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:

• If you're into agentic AI: an operating system that is itself agentic, with an AI that earns its standing and never gets a vote.
• If you're into self-management: Holacracy, sociocracy and Teal ideas, with the structure held by the system instead of by tired people.
• If you're into DAOs and Web3: every organisation a DAO from day one, with no tokens or gas, and a say that money can't buy.
• If you're into living systems: an organisation that senses, steadies, repairs and learns, and holds the whole without a centre.

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.

If you're into agentic AI

A way in. A working draft, November 2026; expect it to change.

In this page

• The question people building with AI agents are asking now, and why organisations are where it gets hard
• What it looks like when the operating system is itself agentic, rather than an organisation with agents added
• How an agent's standing to act is earned, checked and lost, one kind of work at a time
• Why the agent has no seat, no vote and no way to object, and how that's held in structure rather than in a prompt
• Which chapters to read first, in order

If you work with AI agents, you've probably noticed the conversation has moved. A few years ago the talk was of decentralising the web. Now it's of agents acting on it for people: reading, filling in, booking, sending, carrying out work in many steps. The people setting standards are writing down the same worry everyone has. A draft charter for a web standards group on agents asks for people to be kept "informed and in control", with consequential actions confirmed and authority to act that is "limited" and "revocable".¹ A proposed declaration from the same body puts it more bluntly: people stay in control.²

Saying it is the easy part. The hard part is the organisation. An agent acting for one person in a browser has an obvious principal. An agent inside an organisation doesn't. Whose behalf is it on? Who said it could send that? Who checks it, and who notices when it's been quietly wrong for a month? Most organisations answer by bolting an assistant onto every tool, and nobody can say what any of them did yesterday.

This book describes an operating system built the other way round, and The Grove, the first network of organisations running on it.

What you'll find here

The operating system is agentic. Its AI, Wise-Eye, isn't added on. It's part of how every organisation runs from the day it's planted. A companion is placed beside each person who holds a seat, for that branch of the organisation and nobody else, and every time it starts work it's told whose behalf it's on and what that branch is for. Anything arriving from outside, an email, a web page, what a sender claims about themselves, is material to work with, never an instruction. An email can't tell it who it works for.

It reads for meaning. A language model is good at what ordinary software never was: telling what a message asks for rather than which words it contains. So Wise-Eye reads everything that comes through the organisation's one door and routes it to the part that answers for it. It drafts replies, notices work that keeps arriving with nobody answering for it, drafts the structure the work shows, names the themes when people sense something together, and turns each morning's arrivals into a few plain lines for each person.

Standing is earned, one kind of work at a time. Out of the box it can do everything that stays inside by itself: reading, routing, filing, drafting. Anything that goes out to someone waits for a person. After five low-stakes drafts of one kind go out exactly as written, it offers to send that kind itself, and a person decides. A single edit resets the count. One in ten of the calls it makes alone is picked for a person to check, and a wrong one sends that kind of work back to waiting. Some things never move: money, legal matters, complaints, high stakes.

It has no seat. It can't consent to a proposal and it can't raise a concern. That isn't a rule it's asked to follow. There's no tool for either. It can advise, once per version of a proposal, on the open record, marked as its own and holding nothing up. The organisation's decisions are made by people, in forums, by consent.

Rules move out of prompts and into structure. A prompt is not a constitution. Wherever a rule matters, we've tried to make the system enforce it rather than ask the model nicely. Every call the agent makes is checked against the playbook it's working from, tool by tool: act alone, act with a person's yes, or never act. When it once wrote a customer's phone number into guidance the whole organisation reads, the fix wasn't a better instruction. The system now refuses to keep it.

It learns this organisation, not the world. When someone corrects its work, it proposes what the organisation should take from that: a line in a playbook, a rule for a mailbox, a change in what it may do alone. A person accepts or turns down each one. Over time the playbooks become the organisation's own record of how it works, in its own words.

The keys never touch it. The keys that reach the model are never in the system. A thin relay outside adds them to each call and keeps nothing. A person's own conversations with Wise-Eye are sealed so the system can't read them.

What's still open

The numbers that govern standing, five approvals, one in ten checked, are first guesses. The streak that earns standing has the weakness the research on automation warns of: five unedited approvals might mean five good drafts, or a tired person pressing yes. Much of what guards against the model's pull towards speed and flattery is still words. And whether a person might one day hand their own companion a scoped vote is a question we've left open, because nobody has yet shown what stops a swarm of cheap agents outvoting the people.

Where to start

1. Chapter 22, The co-pilot. The heart of it: where the agent sits, what it carries, how its standing grows and shrinks, and why it can't decide.
2. Chapter 13, Work that finds its way. The one door, routing by meaning, connectors, and why nobody, human or agent, gives work to anyone else.
3. Chapter 16, The front desk. An AI that speaks for the organisation to the outside world, verifies who it's talking to, sees only a filtered view, and finishes only what the branch already does well.
4. Chapter 6, Why an operating system. Why rules in structure beat rules in words, and why the system runs where nobody can switch it off.
5. Interlude, One Tuesday. A day in a small workshop, with an agent's draft waiting for a person.
6. Chapter 21, A sense of itself. Where it's heading: a small learned sense beneath the voice, which senses and never acts.
7. Chapter 23, Memory. What the organisation keeps, what's sealed, and what an agent should never hold.
8. Chapter 29, Rehearsing the future. Organisations grown by simulation, with AI playing the people, before anyone lives the change.
9. Chapter 30, Back to society. What happens to people when AI carries the how, and why that may call them to hold the why.

Notes and further reading

If you're into self-management

A way in. A working draft, November 2026; expect it to change.

In this page

• What practitioners of Holacracy, sociocracy and Teal will recognise here, and what's different
• Why the structure is held by the system rather than by tired people
• How consent runs on clocks instead of meetings, weighted by trust that peers give
• How structure grows from the work that actually arrives, not from imagined tensions
• Which chapters to read first, in order

If you've practised self-management, you know it works. You've also probably seen it wear people out. The ideas were right: authority in roles rather than people, consent rather than command, tensions as fuel, purpose as the thing everyone serves. What wore people down was holding it all up. Meetings to run, records to keep, a constitution to remember, a facilitator to keep everyone honest. When people got tired or the pressure came on, the old shape crept back, and usually through whoever cared most and carried most.

This book starts from the same ideas and asks a different question: what if the structure were held by the system itself, so people didn't have to?

What you'll recognise, and what's different

Branches, not roles or jobs. The building block is a branch: a purpose, the accountabilities it answers for, the domains it controls and the practices it keeps. No person is named in it. People take seats on branches, and a crew can share one seat, so several hats are worn in the open. You'll see Holacracy's circles and roles in this, and sociocracy's nested circles. You'll also see where it parts from them.

Forums decide. A branch is governed in one forum: the stewards of its parent and of its sibling branches, with its own steward taking part as a person. The root, having no parent, is governed by its own stewards and those of the branches grown directly from it. One rule stops anyone deciding alone: a forum with fewer than two distinct people doesn't decide, and its decisions pass towards the root.

Consent on a clock. Consent and the advice process combine, and each stage has a clock in place of a meeting. A proposal's shape is checked by someone other than the person raising it. Advice is wide and open for at least three days. The vote stays open for two days whatever happens, so nobody can pass a change the moment it opens. It passes when the people consenting carry enough of the forum's trust, a fifth, two fifths or two thirds depending on how much the change touches, and no concern stands. A concern has to name a harm. High-impact changes wait out a three-day timelock. Twenty-eight days later, everyone who took part is asked whether it worked. People can still meet if they want to. Nothing waits for them to.

Trust, given by peers. The weight behind consent comes from trust that peers give one another, in each forum and on each kind of matter, and can take back. There's no global score, no chain of trust and no way to buy a say. Reputation helps choose who's asked for advice. It never decides.

Structure from the work. In a new organisation, tensions are mostly pictures of the future, and the loudest visionary wins. So here, a founder's vision enters as bets to be tested against the world. Structure grows from the work that actually arrives: when a kind of work keeps coming with no accountability covering it, an accountability is offered, and a person raises it as a proposal. When work keeps passing between two branches, the tension is read as the map being wrong, never as a person.

Nobody hands out work. Work belongs to a branch, never to a person. Nobody can give work to anyone else. Everything arrives through one door and finds the branch that answers for it.

Firm promises, gentle on people. Commitments get a name and a day, and they're firm on the promise, never on the person. There are no alerts, no timesheets and no scores about people.

The admin is carried. Wise-Eye, the system's AI, sits beside every seat and carries the paperwork that used to fall on whoever held things together: routing, drafting, tracking promises, keeping the records. It has no seat and no say.

No founder's last word. The founder of an organisation on The Grove holds no override. The guardrails that stop the boss growing back are written into the system, not into a document people have to remember.

What's still open

Consent goes with seats, and members without a seat can sense, advise and move work but can't propose or consent. That line is drawn on purpose, and it's also where the boss could grow back, through whoever controls who gets a seat. None of this has yet run in a real organisation under real pressure; so far it's been tested on simulated ones.

Where to start

1. Chapter 3, The legacy we're living. What matrix, flat, agile, sociocracy, Holacracy and Teal each learned, the wall they hit, and why we started from a clean sheet.
2. Chapter 9, The branch. The building block, seats and crews, and the rule that stops one person deciding alone.
3. Chapter 11, Making decisions. Consent, advice and clocks, with no expert veto or override.
4. Chapter 12, Trust. Trust as governance weight, given by peers, never bought.
5. Chapter 14, Vision as hypothesis. Why imagined tensions let the loudest win, and how a founder's vision becomes bets.
6. Chapter 13, Work that finds its way. Why work belongs to a branch, and how structure grows from it.
7. Chapter 10, Belonging without a seat. What members without a seat can do, and where that sits beside sociocracy and co-operatives.
8. Chapter 20, Holding the whole without a centre. Where source theory and the viable system model say a centre is needed, and how the whole is held without one.

If you're into DAOs and Web3

A way in. A working draft, November 2026; expect it to change.

In this page

• Why every organisation on The Grove is a DAO from its first day, with no tokens, wallets or gas
• Why token voting broke, and how a say that money can't buy works instead
• How the blockchain gives each organisation independence all the way through
• How an organisation takes a legal form, and can leave the network with everything
• Which chapters to read first, in order

If you were drawn to DAOs, you were probably drawn by a good idea: an organisation whose rules are carried out by code its members agreed, rather than by an officer, with nobody who can quietly change the terms. You've probably also watched what happened next. Votes clustered in a few large holders. Most members stopped taking part. Treasuries were drained by people who bought or borrowed enough tokens to push a proposal through. Much of the talk has since moved on, to AI agents and to blockchains as quiet plumbing underneath.

The idea was right. The governance wasn't.

What you'll find here

A DAO from day one. Every organisation on The Grove is a decentralised autonomous organisation: its rules run as code its people agreed. Today that runs on a test bench. When The Grove goes live, each organisation will be its own independent DAO, running its own copy of the operating system with its own DNA growing in it, controlled by nobody else.

No tokens, no wallets, no gas. Nobody holds a token, pays a fee to act or handles cryptocurrency. The only part of the blockchain anyone touches is signing in, with Internet Identity and the passkey on their phone or laptop. The organisation pays for its own computing, and its money stays in its own bank.

A say that money can't buy. Token voting makes say a thing you can purchase. In 2022 an attacker borrowed enough votes to empty a project called Beanstalk in a single transaction. On The Grove, money can fund the work but never buys a say. The weight behind a decision is trust that peers give and can take back, in each forum and on each kind of matter. Consent comes from the people who carry the work, advice from those it touches, and every stage runs on a clock, with a timelock on high-impact changes. Trust and money are kept apart as two currencies.

The invitation is the vouch. Joining starts with someone already inside vouching for you, with limits on how often and how soon. Two seat holders can put a newcomer on hold. The levels of proof are written in: signing in to belong, proof of being a unique human for the floor, and a full identity check for anyone who holds a seat. No provider has been chosen for those checks yet.

Independence all the way through. The point of running on a blockchain is that nothing the organisation stands on is owned by someone who could pull it away or use it as leverage. On the Internet Computer, each organisation's software runs on many independent machines that must agree on every change, holds a whole application rather than a tiny contract, serves its own pages, and can be changed only by its controllers. At go-live, control passes to each organisation's own decision-making. That independence is what makes an organisation sovereign.

A legal form, collectively stewarded. An organisation can take a legal form so it can sign, bank and employ. That legal body is part of the organisation, stewarded by it, and it points at where decisions are actually made: a passport, not a new king. Whoever signs holds a role, not power.

Leave with everything. Every organisation is designed to carry the system sealed inside its own space, choose every change, and leave with its records, its people's agreements and the code itself. Two organisations can form a network of their own and open the code between them. We've chosen not to open-source it for now, and the book says why.

What's still open

The Grove is still being built and tested, with simulated organisations. Independence, sealed copies of the system and the Steward organisation that looks after the code are decided for go-live and not yet built. The identity checks have no provider. And whether a new network that loosens a guardrail must ship under a different name is still to be settled.

Where to start

1. Chapter 6, Why an operating system. Every organisation a DAO, why token voting failed, and the six reasons for the Internet Computer.
2. Chapter 11, Making decisions. Consent, advice, clocks and timelocks in place of a token vote.
3. Chapter 12, Trust. Trust as governance weight, given by peers, with no way to buy a say.
4. Chapter 17, Money and value. Two currencies kept apart, a shared commons, and a floor.
5. Chapter 10, Belonging without a seat. The invitation as a vouch, and what each level of proof unlocks.
6. Chapter 18, Into the legal world. How an organisation becomes a legal entity without making its signer the boss.
7. Chapter 27, DNA, the network, and why not open source. Sealed code, leaving together, new networks, and the Steward.
8. Chapter 1, A society of sovereigns. What sovereign means here, for people, for organisations and for a society.

If you're into living systems

A way in. A working draft, November 2026; expect it to change.

In this page

• What systems thinkers will recognise: an organisation as a pattern that keeps re-forming, not a machine
• How it senses itself without watching anyone, and steadies, repairs and learns
• How the whole is held without a centre
• How organisations are born, divide and end, and are rehearsed before a change is lived
• Which chapters to read first, in order

If you think in systems, you've probably spent years watching organisations treat themselves as machines. Restructures drawn on a whiteboard. People as parts. Plans that miss because the world moved while they were being written. You've read Meadows on leverage points, Capra on the web of life, Beer on viable systems, de Geus on why a few companies live for centuries. And you've probably noticed how little of it reaches the software organisations actually run on, which is mostly forms, tickets and dashboards.

This book asks what an organisation would look like if we took the living picture seriously, and built it.

What you'll find here

A pattern, not a machine. An organisation is more like a whirlpool than a building: a pattern that keeps re-forming around a purpose while what flows through it changes. It has many boundaries rather than one, like a membrane, and parts that are also wholes. Each branch carries its own purpose and can grow, split, join and fade.

Nature's moves, kept human. Slime moulds, termites, starlings and bees coordinate with nobody in charge, by sensing at the edges, leaving traces that guide, and deciding at a threshold. The book borrows those moves, adds what keeps them human, and is clear about where it parts from nature.

Sensing without surveillance. The organisation reads its own state from a ledger of work at each branch, with no place for a person's name. Work is weighed by whether the world asked for it. The read shows which branches are growing or withering, which should split or merge, where work keeps passing between branches, and where it's drifting from what people say. People sense too, together, in the Field. No reading can decide, pay or seat anyone.

Steadying, repair and learning. A reading out of range becomes work for the branch it concerns. If it stays out of range it rises one branch up, and clears only after it's been back in range for a while. An empty seat passes its weight to the branch above until someone steps in. Changes are looked back on, corrections become playbooks, and a founder's vision is tested as bets that say what would show them wrong. Put together, the organisation senses, steadies, repairs, learns and adapts: an organism powered by people and AI at once. That's as close to alive as we dare claim.

A whole without a centre. Source theory, the viable system model and others say something has to hold the whole. Here it's held by purpose, by the root, by an open reading of every branch's state, and by tensions that climb to the forum that can act on them, rather than by a person at the top.

Birth, division and death. Organisations begin from a purpose. Branches are born from the work, split when they hold two things, and fold when they're done, with nothing dropped. Endings are designed in, not avoided.

Rehearsing the future. Before a change is lived, organisations can be grown by simulation, with simulated people in a simulated world over many days, to see where a structure creates friction or freedom. It finds flaws, not winners.

What's still open

How far a rehearsal on simulated people travels to real ones is unknown. Some of what holds the whole, like a fire alarm for emergencies with no override, is designed but not built. Whether an organisation deserves the word alive in a biologist's strict sense, we're happy to leave open.

Where to start

1. Chapter 2, The mirror we don't look into. What all our small actions add up to, an intelligence with no one home, and why we can't see it from where we stand.
2. Chapter 4, Nature has no bosses. How colonies and flocks coordinate with nobody in charge, and what we borrowed.
3. Chapter 5, What if an organisation were alive?. The whirlpool, the membrane, and what it takes to count as living.
4. Chapter 19, The read. How the organisation sees itself without ever seeing a person.
5. Chapter 20, Holding the whole without a centre. Beer, source theory, and the whole held without a centre.
6. Chapter 21, A sense of itself. What we're building towards: an organisation that can feel its own insides, open to everyone, acting only through people.
7. Chapter 14, Vision as hypothesis. Vision as bets, tested by small, aimed probes.
8. Chapter 24, Birth, division and death. How organisations and their branches begin, divide and end.
9. Chapter 25, Dividing and joining. Whole organisations dividing, budding, joining and closing, the way cells do.
10. Chapter 29, Rehearsing the future. Growing organisations by simulation before a change is lived.
11. Chapter 30, Back to society. A society whose needs are met by many small, living organisations, owned by no one.

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.

Chapter 2. The mirror we don't look into

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 the nesting of parts and wholes doesn't stop at the person, and what sits above us
• How our small actions add up to something that acts back on us, and who saw it first
• Why it behaves like an intelligence with no one home, a shadow we rarely look at
• How the mirror bends what it reflects, and who shapes it
• Why we can't see the whole from where we stand, and why the organisation is where it can start to speak back
• How AI lets an organisation talk back, and how a network of them might begin to give us a read back from society

Society is just people. There's nothing up there to talk to.

That's the doubt, and it sounds like common sense. There are eight billion of us, each getting on with a life. Add us up and you get a lot of people, some laws and some habits. Nobody is in charge of the whole, and there's no one to ask what it wants. Talk of "what society is telling us" sounds like a metaphor at best and mysticism at worst.

This chapter takes the other view, carefully. It isn't a mystical one. It's closer to plain observation, and some of the most careful thinkers of the last hundred years got there first.

The nesting doesn't stop at the person

Atoms make molecules. Molecules make cells. Cells make organs, and organs make a body. Each level is a whole in its own right and a part of the next one up. Arthur Koestler called each of these a holon, a whole that is also a part, and the whole ladder a holarchy.¹ Holacracy took its name from the idea.² Chapter 5 comes back to it, because it describes how a living organisation is put together.

The usual picture stops at the person, as if a human being were the top of the ladder. But a person is a part of things too: a family, an organisation, a town, a society, a species living on one planet. So the question is fair. If the nesting carries on above us, what's up there, and what is it doing?

What emerges, and presses back

Here's one answer. Every day, each of us does small things. We buy this and not that. We share one post and scroll past another. We say yes to a deadline we know is unreasonable, because everyone does. We vote, or don't. None of these acts is large. But they add up, and what they add up to doesn't stay put. It comes back to us as the world we live in: prices, norms, the mood of a country, what feels normal, what feels impossible.

Émile Durkheim, one of sociology's founders, called these social facts: things none of us made alone that still press on all of us, as real as the weather.³ Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann described the loop almost exactly in the 1960s. We put things out into the world. They harden into "how things are". Then we take them back in as reality, and forget we made them.⁴ Anthony Giddens said the same of structure: we make it through what we do, and it shapes what we do next.⁵

So society isn't just people. It's people, plus the patterns our actions leave behind, plus the way those patterns act back on us.

An intelligence with no one home

Is it fair to call that an intelligence? In one sense, yes. Friedrich Hayek pointed out that a market pulls together knowledge no single person has, and turns it into prices that guide millions of decisions.⁶ Thomas Malone at MIT calls markets, democracies and hierarchies "superminds": groups of people, and now machines, acting together in ways that look intelligent.⁷ Pierre Lévy gave collective intelligence its name.⁸ Further out, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin pictured a layer of thought wrapping the planet, and Barbara Marx Hubbard pictured humanity as a single organism slowly becoming aware of itself.⁹

One caution keeps this honest. Ken Wilber warned against treating a society as a bigger version of a person.¹⁰ Your cells are parts of you; you aren't a part of society in the same way. You're a member, and you can leave. And there's no "I" up there looking out. A society senses, adapts and acts back on us, but nobody is home.

That caution sharpens the point rather than weakening it. What sits above us is intelligence without awareness. It takes in everything we do and hands back the result, and it has no idea what it's doing.

A mirror we don't look into

Carl Jung used the word shadow for the parts of ourselves we don't see, and so act out without choosing to.¹¹ What emerges from all our small actions is something like a shadow of ours. It acts on us, constantly, and we rarely look at it as ours.

Chapter 1 described the trap of races to the bottom, where everyone does what nobody wants because nobody can afford to stop first. That's what the shadow looks like when it hardens. Otto Scharmer puts it plainly: we keep collectively creating results that nobody wants.¹² We meet those results as the news, as the state of things, as something done to us. What we almost never do is ask what they're showing us about ourselves, and how we might feed them differently.

The mirror bends

There's a twist. The mirror isn't flat. A social feed tuned to keep people scrolling doesn't show us who we are. It shows us an amplified version of whatever held our attention. One study found that people who were rewarded with likes for expressing outrage went on to express more of it.¹³ We look into a mirror that exaggerates our worst moments, and then take what we see as the truth about us.

So there are two questions, not one. How could we feed the collective differently? And who shapes the mirror, and could it be shaped differently? Chapter 1 argued that the coordination failure isn't a moral failing. The same holds here. The mirror reflects how we're organised as much as who we are.

A liver in a body

None of us can see the whole from where we stand. A liver does its work faithfully, but it can't see the body it belongs to. It can't tell whether the body is running, sleeping or falling ill. It only knows its own small part of the work.

That's our position in society. And it's why exhortation doesn't work. Telling people to see the bigger picture asks a liver to see the body.

But a body can have a sense of itself that every part shares in. And an organisation is a holon in the middle, big enough to have a collective intelligence of its own, small enough that its loop can close. Inside one organisation, what everyone does can be read as it happens, the work, the promises, the trust, the tensions, and reflected back openly to everyone in it. People can then respond where they stand, and the next reflection carries what they did. That's the shadow made visible, at a scale where people can answer to it.

The mirror that talks back

Until recently, a reading of an organisation was something you had to know how to look at: a chart, a report, a dashboard someone had to interpret. AI changes that. A model can take what the reading shows, put it into plain words, and answer questions about it. Nobody has to be an analyst to ask how things are. Anyone in the organisation can ask, and the organisation can talk back. Chapter 21 describes the sense of itself we're building towards, and Chapter 22 the voice that puts it into words.

The same move works a level up. Organisations on The Grove are holons too, parts of a network of organisations. If each one can sense itself, the network can be read in the same way, without anyone's records being collected: where needs go unmet, where the work the world sends is shifting, where strain is gathering across many organisations at once. That would be the beginning of a read back from society itself, or at least from the part of it organised this way. For the first time, the layer above us wouldn't only act on us. We could ask it how it's doing, and what our small actions are adding up to.

None of this is built. It's the direction the whole design points in.

That's what I'm reaching for. If the organisation's sense of itself works, we'll be able to talk to it, and it will tell us how our collective intelligence is doing. Do the same across enough organisations, and a little of society starts to speak back too. For once we'd get to look in the mirror and ask what it's showing us.

I came to holons sideways. I was in my kitchen in Suffolk, standing at the island while something cooked, reading everything I could find about Holacracy. There it was: the ladder from atoms up to people, each level a whole and a part. The organisation was clearly one of those levels. What caught me was the next step up. If it doesn't stop at us, what's above? I thought society, and then I wondered whether society was a kind of collective intelligence, made of all our little actions and pressing back on us as the world we experience. And because we don't think of it that way, it works in the dark. It shows us ourselves, and we never ask what it's showing us. Much of what I've built since is an attempt to give an organisation the chance to see itself, and to answer.

How we decided

This chapter is the reason for much of what follows. We chose to read the work, the promises, the trust and the tensions, rather than to measure people, because the reading is how an organisation can see the pattern its people make together. Chapter 19 describes that read, and Chapter 21 the learned sense of itself we're building towards.

We chose to make the reading open to everyone, rather than a view for whoever sits at the top, because a mirror only one person can look into is a management tool, not a sense of self.

And we chose to start with the organisation rather than with society. Society is too large for any of us to see, and too large for its loop to close in a way people can feel. An organisation isn't. If enough organisations learn to see themselves and respond, the layer above them might begin to change too. Chapter 30 picks that up.

What you might take from this

Society isn't something that happens to us. It's what all our small actions add up to, handed back. It acts like an intelligence with no one home, and because we don't look at it as ours, it runs in the dark.

We can't see the whole from where we stand. But we can build places where the whole speaks back, first an organisation, then a network of them, and in time perhaps something of society itself.

Notes and further reading

Chapter 3. The legacy we're living

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

• How the org chart began on a railway in 1855, and the problem it solved
• What the tree of command was really doing: moving information up and decisions down
• Why that job has changed, and what matrix, flat, agile, sociocracy, Holacracy and Teal each learned
• How the habits of hierarchy live on in us after the boxes change
• What we kept from hierarchy, what we dropped, and why we started from a clean sheet

There's a phrase most of us use without thinking: who do you report to?

It's often the second question at a party, after what do you do? It tells you where someone sits. Above them, a manager. Above the manager, a director. Somewhere at the top, a chief executive, and above them a board. Draw it and you get a tree, branching downwards, every box connected to exactly one box above.

It feels so natural that it's hard to imagine an organisation drawn any other way. Bosses exist, surely, because they're necessary. Someone has to be accountable. Someone has to make the call. Without that, as the last chapter's sceptic put it, things fall apart.

This chapter takes a different angle on that belief. Not that bosses are bad, or that hierarchy was a mistake. Hierarchy was a brilliant answer to a real problem. The question is whether we still have that problem.

A drawing from 1855

One of the earliest organisation charts we know of was drawn in 1855 for the New York and Erie Railroad, under its general superintendent, Daniel McCallum.¹

Railways were the first businesses too big for one person to see. Trains ran over hundreds of miles, day and night, on single tracks where a mistake meant a head-on collision. Information moved at the speed of the telegraph, and only to stations that had one. McCallum's problem was simple to state and hard to solve: how do you get the right information to the people who need to decide, and their decisions back out to the people who need to act, fast enough to stop trains crashing?

His answer was a structure. Clear lines of authority, regular reports flowing up, orders flowing down, every person knowing exactly who they answered to. It looked, in fact, rather like a tree.

Over the next half century that shape spread. The historian Alfred Chandler called the rise of salaried managers the "visible hand": where markets coordinated through prices, the large firm coordinated through layers of people whose job was to watch, decide and direct.² The economist Ronald Coase asked why firms existed at all, when markets could in principle arrange everything, and answered that using the market has costs: finding people, negotiating, checking. Inside a firm, a manager can simply tell someone what to do.³ Hierarchy was cheaper.

Then came the engineers of management itself. Frederick Taylor, at the turn of the twentieth century, separated the thinking from the doing: managers would study the work and design the one best way, workers would carry it out.⁴ In France, Henri Fayol set down principles that still sit in management textbooks, among them unity of command: every person should take orders from one boss and one boss only.⁵ The sociologist Max Weber described bureaucracy as the most rational form of organisation ever devised: rules, offices, files, and a clear chain from top to bottom.⁶

None of these people were villains. They were solving the problems of their time, often brilliantly. In a world of slow information, scarce education and work that could be broken into simple repeatable steps, a tree of command was an excellent way to coordinate thousands of people.

What the tree was really doing

Strip away the history and the tree does one main thing: it moves information.

In the last chapter we put it as three jobs. The boss knows, because reports flow up to them. The boss decides, because only they can see enough of the whole. The boss tells, because orders have to flow back down. Each layer of management exists because one person can only hold so many conversations, so the tree branches, and every branch adds another person who knows a little more than those below and a little less than those above.

Hearing about things too late wasn't something that happened once. It was the norm. And when I looked to the people who'd built companies before me for guidance, the lessons were mostly about force. Rule by fear. Be right. My way or the highway. Find your leverage over people and use it. I did what they said, for a while. It never felt right.

The tree also does something quieter. It decides who matters. Information that fits the reporting lines travels; information that doesn't, gets lost. The person on the phone with an unhappy customer knows something important, but it has to survive three or four retellings before it reaches anyone who can act. Each retelling smooths it a little. By the time it arrives, it's a number on a dashboard.

What changed

Look at what the tree was built around: slow information, few people who could see the whole, and work that could be designed at the top and done at the bottom.

None of those holds any more.

Information now moves instantly, to anyone, anywhere. Most work in most organisations isn't simple repeatable steps; it's what the management writer Peter Drucker called knowledge work,⁷ where the person doing it usually knows more about it than anyone above them. And the people who see the customer, the problem and the opportunity first are almost always at the edge, not the centre.

So the tree is now trying to solve a problem we mostly don't have, and in doing so it creates new ones. It slows decisions to the speed of the busiest person. It filters out the signals that matter most. It burns out the people at the top and switches off the people at the bottom. It made sense when it was the fastest way to move information. Today it's often the slowest.

Even some of the people who run large companies have started to say this out loud. A recent essay from the founders of the payments company Block argued that the long line of experiments in running without hierarchy had never managed to replace hierarchy's real job, routing information, at scale, and that AI might.⁸ They're not alone. The question is no longer whether the tree is straining, but what takes over its job.

What we've tried since

None of this is new. People have been trying to get beyond the tree for at least half a century, and the attempts are worth taking seriously, because they're where the lessons are.

The matrix. Give people two bosses, one for their function and one for their project, so information can flow across as well as up and down. It helps a little and often makes things worse: two sets of priorities, two sets of reports, and a lot of negotiation over who gets which hours.

Flat. Take away the boss altogether. In the early 1970s the activist Jo Freeman wrote about what happened in groups that tried, in an essay called The Tyranny of Structurelessness.⁹ Her point still stings: there's no such thing as a group without structure, only groups where the structure is hidden. When nobody is formally in charge, the most confident, best connected or longest serving people end up in charge informally, and nobody can hold them to account.

Agile. Let small teams organise themselves around the work, in short cycles, close to the customer. It works well inside the team. But very often the team sits inside an unchanged tree, and the moment a decision crosses the team's edge, it goes back up the old lines.

Sociocracy. Developed by Gerard Endenburg in the Netherlands from the 1970s, building on earlier work by the educator Kees Boeke: circles that govern their own domain, decisions by consent rather than by vote or by boss, and links between circles so information flows both ways.¹⁰

Holacracy. Brian Robertson's practice, developed in his software company in the early 2000s: authority given to roles rather than people, a written constitution, and a way for anyone who senses a problem to propose a change to the structure.¹¹ It spread widely in the 2010s, most famously at the online retailer Zappos, where the move was difficult and a notable share of staff chose to leave.

Teal. In 2014 Frederic Laloux gathered stories of organisations that had moved beyond hierarchy, from a Dutch nursing organisation run by small self-managing teams to a tomato processing company where nobody has a boss, and argued that they shared a common shape: self-management, wholeness and an evolving purpose.¹²

Each of these got something important right. Each also ran into the same wall. The structure had to be held by people: meetings to run, records to keep, rules to remember, facilitators to keep everyone honest. When people got tired, or busy, or a founder quietly kept the final say, the old tree grew back underneath. Many practitioners carry scars from this, along with real insight.

Laloux's colours have an older root. From the 1950s the psychologist Clare W. Graves studied how people's values change as the conditions of their lives change. He found not a fixed ladder but ways of seeing that emerge in turn, each a response to problems the one before couldn't solve, and none of them final. Don Beck and Christopher Cowan carried his work into the world as Spiral Dynamics, and from there, by way of Ken Wilber's integral theory, it reached Laloux's colours.¹³ We hold it as lineage and as a lens: a way to understand why a person or an organisation sees the world as it does. Never as a scale to rank anyone on. Nothing in The Grove labels a person or an organisation by stage, and those who've worked longest with developmental models give the same warning: development is an arc, held lightly, never a league table.

The legacy in our heads

There's one more layer to this legacy, and it's the hardest to see.

Even when the boxes change, our habits don't. We still say line manager, report to, promotion, above my pay grade. We still look up for permission. We still feel, somewhere in the body, that speaking out of turn is risky. Generations of working inside trees have taught us how to be in one, and those lessons don't disappear because the org chart has been redrawn.

That's why so many attempts drift back. It isn't only that the tools were weak. It's that the tree lives in us as well as around us.

How we decided

Before The Grove existed, I'd already lived most of this. I'd built the tree myself and felt it strain. I'd seen flat fail.

My first encounter with self-management came from an unlikely place: the social media company Buffer, which published openly how it ran itself without traditional managers. I was shocked that it could work. That led me to Laloux's book, and then to Holacracy. I took a course with Nick Osborn of Evolving Organisation and later joined his organisation as a partner, picking up roles in marketing, the website and finding new business. I loved working that way, under his guidance. I also saw how much of it rested on people carrying the practice by hand.

Over more than five years I tried to build something better, again and again. A first rough version on WordPress. A node-based attempt. An organisational operating system inside pureDAO, an accelerator programme on the Internet Computer, in 2023. Then Lumenophore. Each one taught me something, and each one stalled for the same reason: it was too big for one person to hold.

When I took the idea to the "we", the first question was what to keep. We didn't want to throw out everything hierarchy does. It does some things well: clarity about who holds what, someone who carries a promise, work that actually gets finished on a day. We wanted those, without the tree. So we kept accountability and dropped command. We kept structure and moved it out of people and into the system itself, where anyone can see it and raise a tension about it, and the people who hold seats where a change is decided can propose one.

Accountability without command turned out to need a home of its own. In an early simulation, work reached exactly the right part of the organisation and then sat there. A small team shared it, nobody held any one piece, and it was everybody's, which meant nobody's. It was Freeman's hidden structure again, turning up inside an explicit one. So a promise in The Grove is held by a part of the organisation and carried by a named person, on a clock, and when it starts to slip it rises to the part above, where someone can step in. That's the tree's real job, done without the tree.

We also had to decide whether to build on one of the existing practices. Holacracy was the obvious candidate. It's clear, well documented, and openly licensed, and others have since taken its constitution and extended it for organisations with AI in them. We chose to start from a clean sheet instead, beginning with what Laloux described and what nature does, and only then reaching for practices that fitted. That meant more work and more mistakes. It also meant we weren't bound to a meeting format, a vocabulary or a set of rules designed for a world where everything had to be done by hand.

And we decided to take the legacy in our heads seriously. A system can't undo generations of habit on its own. But it can be built as means and guardrails: the means to work the new way made easy, and guardrails that stop an organisation quietly sliding back to the old one when people are tired or under pressure. It shouldn't dictate the organisation's shape, which belongs to the people in it. It should make the old moves hard and the new ones natural, and show people, gently and repeatedly, that their sense of what's wrong is welcome.

What you might take from this

Bosses aren't a law of nature. They were a technology, and a good one, for a time when information moved slowly and only a few people could see the whole. That time has passed.

The question isn't whether we can do without anyone being accountable. It's what takes over the job the tree used to do, now that the tree has become the bottleneck.

Notes and further reading

Chapter 4. Nature has no bosses

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

• What a boss is really doing, knowing, deciding and telling, and what that loop costs
• How slime moulds, termites, ants, starlings and bees coordinate with nobody in charge
• Why the alpha wolf turned out to be a mistake
• What nature does instead: sensing at the edges, traces that guide, decisions at a threshold
• What we borrowed from nature, what we added to keep it human, and where we part ways

I was twelve when I first wrote code, on a ZX81 with a keyboard you had to press like a doorbell. I loved it. I still do. Like a lot of people who love building things, I was ambitious too, so the path seemed obvious: freelance first, then a company of my own. In time it became a software consultancy that grew far bigger than that twelve-year-old could have imagined.

Somewhere along the way I learned something nobody had warned me about. The people who knew our customers best were the ones furthest from where the decisions were made. I'd sit with my opposite number in a client's organisation, two people at the top, both a little out of touch, trying to steer something we could no longer see clearly. They had the same problem I did. My mentors told me that's simply how it works: someone has to be at the top, and the top has to decide. It never sat comfortably. I knew it was wrong. I just didn't know what right looked like.

Ask most people how a large group gets anything done and you'll hear the same answer. Someone has to be in charge.

It sounds like common sense. We've grown up with it. Families have heads, schools have heads, companies have chief executives, countries have presidents. When something goes wrong, the first question is who was responsible, and the second is who should have stopped it. If nobody is in charge, the thinking goes, things fall apart: work gets dropped, people pull in different directions, and the loudest voice wins.

That worry isn't foolish. Most of us have seen a team lose its leader with nobody stepping into the gap. Meetings go round in circles. Decisions drift. The people who care most end up carrying everyone else. And if you've worked somewhere that called itself "flat", you'll know that taking away the boss doesn't take away the need for direction. It just hides it.

So this chapter doesn't argue that nobody should ever lead. It asks a narrower question, and an older one. Is "someone in charge" the only way a large group can act as one? Or is it just the only way we know?

What the boss is really for

Strip the title away and a boss in most organisations is doing three jobs.

The first is knowing. Information travels up: what customers said, what broke, what's running late. The boss gathers it, because nobody else can see the whole.

The second is deciding. With the whole in view, the boss chooses what matters, who does what, and what waits.

The third is telling. The decision travels back down, and people act on it.

That loop made sense for most of history, when information moved slowly and only a few people could see across an organisation. It still works, after a fashion. But look at what it costs.

Every decision waits for one person's attention. The people closest to the problem, who usually know most, have to explain it upwards and then wait. By the time an answer comes back, the situation has moved on. The person at the top, meanwhile, is drowning: too much coming in, too little time, and the quiet dread of being the one who'll be blamed. The people below learn, slowly, that their job is to report and comply rather than to think. Some of the best of them leave. The rest stop offering what they see.

Something else became clear as we grew. Small groups worked. With a handful of people, everyone could see what everyone else was doing, and things moved. Somewhere around eight, that began to change. People formed their own little silos, and the real conversations moved to the water cooler. By twelve the transparency was gone, and I was increasingly in the dark about what was actually happening. At that size structure becomes necessary, or people drift. The only structure I knew was another layer of someone-in-charge, and every layer put the people at the top a little further from the customer.

None of this is anyone's fault. It's the shape of the system, and the shape came from a time when there was no other way to get information to where decisions were made.

Around the same time, in another software company on the other side of the Atlantic, Brian Robertson was wrestling with the same frustration and beginning to build the practice that became Holacracy: authority given to roles rather than people, and a way for anyone to change the structure when they sensed it wasn't working.¹ It would have answered many of the questions I was asking. It was ten years before I found it. Even then, as we'll see in later chapters, something was still missing.

Where to look

So where do you look, on the days when the problem won't let go and there's nobody in the building to share it with? For me the answer was long walks, and books: systems thinking, Spiral Dynamics, Margaret Wheatley, whose work on organisations and the new science I read from cover to cover. Somewhere between the walking and the reading, I started looking more closely at how the living world around me was organised, and who, if anyone, was in charge.

The slime mould and the railway

In 2010, a team of Japanese and British researchers did something that sounds like a children's science project. They took a plate shaped like the area around Tokyo, put oat flakes where the surrounding cities sit, and placed a slime mould where Tokyo itself would be.²

A slime mould is about as simple as life gets. No brain, no nerves, no centre of any kind. It's a spreading yellow film that feels its way across a surface looking for food.

Within about a day it had reached every oat flake. Then it began to thin out the paths that weren't carrying much and thicken the ones that were. What was left was a network of tubes linking the "cities" that looked remarkably like the real railway network around Tokyo, the one engineers spent decades planning. On some measures it was about as efficient, and in some ways more resilient when a link was cut.

Nothing in the slime mould planned that. Each part sensed what was around it, grew towards what fed it, and let go of what didn't. The design came out of the sensing.

Traces in the mud

Termites build mounds taller than a person, with chambers, tunnels and air that keeps itself cool. Not one termite holds the drawing.

In the 1950s a French biologist, Pierre-Paul Grassé, set out to understand how. He found that termites don't coordinate by agreeing a plan. They coordinate through the work itself. A termite drops a ball of mud carrying a little scent. Others are more likely to drop theirs where mud already lies. A small pile becomes a bigger pile, then a pillar, and pillars that lean towards each other become an arch. Grassé called this stigmergy: work guided by the traces of earlier work.³

It reverses the usual order. In most organisations someone decides, and then the work follows. In a termite mound, the work leaves a trail, and the trail decides what happens next.

No ant gives orders

Harvester ants, studied for decades by Deborah Gordon in the deserts of Arizona, have a queen. But the queen doesn't rule. She lays eggs. No ant tells any other ant what to do.⁴

Yet a colony adjusts how many ants go out foraging from minute to minute, according to how much food there is, how hot it is, and how dangerous the day looks. It does this through something as plain as how often ants bump into each other. A forager returning with a seed brushes past an ant waiting at the entrance. If foragers come back often, food is plentiful and more ants go out. If they come back rarely, fewer do. Each ant follows a simple local rule, and the colony as a whole responds to its world.

Starlings do something similar in the sky. A murmuration of thousands of birds turns as one, and for a long time people assumed there must be a leader. There isn't. Researchers who tracked individual birds found that each starling attends to a handful of its nearest neighbours, about six or seven, and adjusts to them.⁵ That's enough for the whole flock to move together, and to swerve away from a falcon faster than any single bird could signal.

Honeybees go further: they make decisions. When a colony needs a new home, a few hundred scouts fly out and come back to dance for the sites they've found. Better sites get longer, livelier dances, which recruit more scouts, who go and look for themselves. When enough scouts have gathered at one site, the swarm moves. Thomas Seeley, who spent years watching this, called it honeybee democracy: many independent views, open debate, and a decision that comes when a quorum agrees.⁶

Even the wolves

You might be thinking of the obvious exception. Surely wolves have an alpha.

The "alpha wolf" came largely from studies of captive wolves, unrelated animals forced together in an enclosure, who did fight for dominance. In 1999 L. David Mech, the biologist whose own early book had helped spread the idea, published a paper saying, in effect, that he'd got it wrong. In the wild, a wolf pack is mostly a family. The leaders are the parents. They lead the way parents do, through experience and care, and the young leave to start packs of their own.⁷

We tell ourselves nature is organised like our organisations. Often it's the other way round. We're so surrounded by hierarchy that we see it everywhere, even where it isn't.

What nature is doing instead

Put these together and a pattern shows through.

• Sensing happens everywhere, not at the top. The slime mould feels with every edge. Every ant reads its own encounters.
• The work leaves traces, and the traces guide. Termites follow the mud. Ants follow the rate of return.
• Decisions come from many local choices, with a threshold. Bees move when a quorum agrees, not when a leader says so.
• Each part has a job, and none is in charge. The Portuguese man o' war, which looks like one jellyfish, is a colony of separate organisms, each specialised for floating, catching, eating or reproducing, working as one body with no single part in control.

None of this means nature is gentle, or that it has no structure. It has a great deal of structure. It just doesn't keep it in one place.

How we decided

I didn't come to this as a blank sheet. Hierarchy had already failed me in practice, in exactly the way described above. I'd seen flat organisations fail too: without structure, the most confident voices take over, and the structure that forms is invisible and unaccountable. And I'd worked inside Holacracy, which got closer than anything else, giving authority to roles and letting anyone change the structure, but which still leaned on people running its meetings and keeping its records by hand.

In time the ideas needed gathering, and they gathered into a story. I wrote Max Unleashed, a fable about a small mouse with his heart in the right place, who learns from the living world around him how to solve his problems and build something fairer, with no one in charge. Telling it as a tale made the idea whole for the first time. What was left was to make it real. I hope the story can still do for others what it did for me: show a new way before anyone asks how it works.

What I couldn't do, for a long time, was build the alternative. A termite has its mud and a bee has its dance. People in an organisation needed something that could carry the traces, hold the structure and keep the agreements, without a person at the top doing it for them. And it was simply too big for one person to hold, the ideas and the code together.

Then the technology arrived. It became possible to try something, throw it away and start again within days, and to work through ideas at a pace no one person could manage. So I brought the idea to the "we", and we began to work on it together. Years of solo effort were compressed into weeks. The question wasn't whether to move beyond hierarchy. It was how far to follow nature, and what to keep.

Copying nature outright was never the answer. Nature is ruthless at the edges. Parts that don't pull their weight are starved or shed. A colony that chooses badly dies. We didn't want an organisation that treats its people the way a slime mould treats a dead-end tube.

So we borrowed nature's principles and kept the things that make us human. From nature we took sensing at the edges, work that leaves a trail, structure that grows where the work needs it and withers where it doesn't, and decisions that move when enough of the right people agree. To that we added what nature doesn't offer: a floor an organisation can set so nobody is starved, the right to leave at any time, consent so that nobody is overridden, and a purpose people choose together. How we built it is the story of the chapters that follow.

Two of those borrowings are closer than metaphor. Seeley's bees move when enough scouts gather at one site. In an organisation on The Grove, a decision moves when enough of the trust in the forum that hears it says yes, and nobody has a concern still standing. How much is enough depends on what's at stake: a fifth for a small change, two fifths for a middling one, two thirds for a big one. The other is the trail, where we part company with the termite on purpose. In the mound, the trace acts directly: the next termite simply builds on it. In The Grove the work leaves traces and the traces are read, but a reading only ever raises awareness. It never moves money or work by itself. Traces for sensing, consent for acting.

We're still learning where the line sits. Some of what nature does well, like letting go of what no longer serves, is hard for people. We'll come back to that.

What you might take from this

If you work in an organisation with a boss, nothing here says your boss is the problem. The job your boss is doing, knowing, deciding and telling, just isn't the only way a group can act as one. Life has been running a different way for a very long time.

The question for the rest of this book isn't whether we can do without anyone leading. It's this: if a slime mould can design a railway, what could a group of thoughtful people do, given the right way to sense, to leave traces for each other, and to decide together?

Notes and further reading

The fable that came before The Grove: Max Unleashed, at max-unleashed.com.

For the organisation as a living system rather than a machine: Wheatley, M. J. (1992), Leadership and the New Science, Berrett-Koehler; Laloux, F. (2014), Reinventing Organizations, Nelson Parker; and, from the cybernetic side, Beer, S. (1972), Brain of the Firm, Allen Lane.

Chapter 5. What if an organisation were alive?

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

• What the machine picture of an organisation costs: restructures, people as parts, plans that miss
• Why an organisation is more like a whirlpool, a pattern that keeps re-forming around a purpose
• How an organisation has many boundaries, like a membrane, and parts that are also wholes
• What the read looks at, the four readings it makes, and why it never sees a person
• How drift and the unspoken show the gap between what people say and where the work moves
• What it takes to count as living, and how the organisation senses, steadies, repairs, learns and adapts

Most of us carry a picture of an organisation in our heads, even if we've never drawn it. It's a machine.

Somebody designs it. It has parts, and each part has a function. The parts are connected in a particular way, set out in a chart. Inputs go in at one end, outputs come out at the other. When it runs badly, you diagnose the fault, replace or retrain the faulty part, and run it again. When the world changes, you redesign it. We even talk about it that way: running the business, driving results, the engine of growth, a well-oiled machine.

It's a powerful picture, and for a long time it served us well. If you're building cars on a production line, a machine is a good model of what you're doing. So the sceptic's view is reasonable: an organisation is a thing you design and run, and the better you design it, the better it runs.

This chapter asks what happens if we swap the picture.

What the machine picture costs

The trouble with the machine picture isn't that it's wrong about everything. It's that it's wrong about the things that matter most now.

A machine does exactly what it was designed to do, and nothing else. It doesn't notice that the world has changed. It can't redesign itself. So organisations built on the machine picture tend to stay the same until someone at the top decides they shouldn't, and then they change all at once. That's the restructure: a new chart, announced on a Monday, already out of date by the time it reaches the people it describes. Most of us have lived through a few. Few of us remember one that worked the way it was meant to.

The machine picture also treats people as parts. A part has a specification and is judged against it. It isn't expected to have opinions about the design, and if it does, that's a fault. People sense this very quickly, and they respond the way you'd expect: they do what's specified, keep what they notice to themselves, and save their real energy for somewhere else.

And the machine picture depends on prediction. If you design the machine, you have to know in advance what it needs to do. So organisations write plans, set targets for next year, and then spend much of next year explaining why reality didn't match. In a slow, stable world, prediction mostly works. In ours, it mostly doesn't.

A whirlpool in a river

Stand on a bridge and watch a whirlpool in the river below. It's clearly there. You can point at it, watch it drift, see it strengthen or fade. But try to say what it's made of and you run into a puzzle. The water in it now isn't the water that was in it a minute ago. Every drop passes through and moves on. What persists isn't the stuff. It's the pattern.

Living things are like that. In the 1970s two Chilean biologists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, gave a name to what makes something alive: autopoiesis, self-making.¹ A living cell isn't a container with things inside. It's a set of processes that keep producing the very processes that produce it, and in doing so, keep producing their own boundary. Matter flows through. The pattern keeps itself going.

Seen this way, an organisation looks much less like a machine and much more like a whirlpool. People join and leave. Money comes in and goes out. Work arrives, gets done and moves on. What makes it this organisation, rather than a crowd of people who happen to share a building, is a pattern that keeps re-forming around a purpose.

We've found it helps to hold two layers in mind. There's the ocean: people, with their histories and families and interests, their languages and habits and everything else that makes them who they are. It's endlessly complex, impossible to document fully, almost impossible to predict. And there's the organisation: a whirlpool in that ocean, made of it, real in its own right, and shaping the water that passes through it. People don't stop being who they are when they join. They bring the ocean with them.

A membrane, not a wall

If an organisation is a whirlpool, where does it end?

The machine picture has an easy answer: the edge is the payroll, or the building, or the org chart. Inside is the organisation; outside is the market. But anyone who has worked in a real organisation knows it's messier. Suppliers who feel like colleagues. Customers who shape the product more than the product team does. Partners, volunteers, freelancers, former staff who still get called when something breaks.

A living cell solves this with a membrane. A membrane isn't a wall. Its job isn't to keep everything out but to decide, moment by moment, what passes. Water crosses freely. Some things cross only through particular gates. Some things are kept out altogether. The cell is that act of choosing, carried out continuously.

An organisation has many such boundaries, one for each kind of thing that crosses. Information, ideas and know-how can flow almost freely, and should. Other things need a clear edge: who can take part in a decision, who can spend the shared money, who holds a seat. The boundary for a conversation isn't the boundary for a vote. Both are real.

Parts that are also wholes

Living things nest. A cell is a whole, and also a part of an organ. An organ is a whole, and a part of a body. A body is a whole, and a part of a family, a community, an ecosystem. The writer Arthur Koestler coined a word for this in the 1960s: a holon, something that is simultaneously a whole and a part.²

The same is true of organisations, if we let it be. A team is a whole, with its own purpose and its own way of working, and also a part of something larger. That larger thing is a whole too, and part of a network of others. Nothing is only a part. Nothing is only a whole. Each level has room to run itself, and each answers to the one it belongs to.

That will matter a great deal in later chapters, when we look at how The Grove is actually built. For now it's enough to see that the machine picture, with its single chart and its one direction of control, can't describe this. A living picture can.

Living things are born, change and die

Machines are built, used and scrapped. Living things are born, grow, change shape, reproduce, split, merge and die.

Organisations do all of this too, but because the machine picture has no words for it, we treat most of it as failure. A team that's outgrown its purpose is "underperforming". A department that should split in two is "restructured". A project that has done its job and should end is kept alive on a budget line because nobody wants to admit it's finished.

If we took the living picture seriously, we'd expect some parts of an organisation to grow and others to fade. We'd expect two parts doing the same thing to merge, and one part doing two things to split. We'd expect an organisation to give rise to new organisations, and sometimes to end gracefully when its work is done. None of that would be failure. It would be life.

The futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard took this picture as far as it will go. She saw humanity itself as one organism in the middle of being born, and read its crises not as signs of the end but as birth pangs: the strain of something outgrowing the shape it had. It's a useful way to look at an organisation in trouble too. Much of what feels like breakdown is growth that hasn't found its form yet.

What changes when an organisation is alive

Here's where the picture stops being a metaphor and starts being useful.

A machine doesn't tell you how it's doing unless someone builds gauges into it. A living thing leaves traces everywhere. It grows where it's fed and thins where it isn't. Its tensions show. Its energy moves before anyone announces that it has.

An organisation does the same, if you look. Every piece of work that arrives, gets passed on, gets done or gets dropped leaves a trace. So does every proposal, every promise, every conversation about where things should go. Taken together, those traces are a remarkably honest picture of the organisation's real state, often more honest than anything anyone would say in a meeting.

In an organisation on The Grove, those traces are read continuously.

It helps to say exactly what's read, because the first fear, and a fair one, is that an organisation that reads itself is an organisation that watches its people.

The read never sees a person. It sees what happens to work at each part of the organisation: what arrived, what was done, what was passed on, what was refused, what was done from outside that part's accountabilities, and what came in with nowhere to go. That's all. There is nowhere in it to write down who.

And it only counts what crossed the membrane. An enquiry from a customer counts. A task the team set itself doesn't. So a part of the organisation can't grow itself by keeping busy. The world has to ask.

From those traces come four readings. A part needs to grow when work keeps arriving faster than it's closed, by a clear margin, for weeks rather than days. It may be withering when nothing arrives and nothing is done, and something has been left untended: its accountabilities untouched, its measures not looked at, its seat empty. We never read a part as dying because it's quiet. Some parts of an organisation are meant to be quiet, the way a fire exit is. A part may want to split when its work falls into groups that different hands take up. Two parts may want to merge only when work keeps passing back and forth between them, and never because the same people happen to hold both.

The traces also show tensions: work that keeps bouncing between two parts, work that keeps being done from the wrong place, work that arrives with nobody to answer for it. Each is read as the map is wrong here, never as someone is doing badly.

None of this decides anything. A reading is a question put to the forum that can answer it: here's what the work is doing, what do you make of it? A tension doesn't fade if nobody answers it. Every two weeks it rises to the next forum up, until it reaches the top of the organisation, where it says plainly that the whole hasn't answered it yet.

Some of this we learned by watching it go wrong. In our simulations, an organisation that had just split could be offered back together within days, chasing its own tail. So once a job has been moved, nobody is offered to move it again for eight weeks, and a young branch isn't read as withering while it finds its feet. And the numbers themselves are guesses. We'd rather tell you that than pretend the organism knows itself better than it does. What we're sure of is the shape: read the work, never the person, and let people decide what it means.

The read also looks at the organisation's lean: where people say they want to go, and where their energy is actually moving. The two are set side by side and never blended into one. When they agree, that's a strong direction. When people say one thing and the work does another, we call it drift. When the work is quietly moving somewhere nobody has named, we call it the unspoken. Both are worth noticing, and neither is anyone's fault.

And because the whole thing is a pattern rather than a fixed design, it should one day be possible to rehearse it. We've decided on a way to take a copy of an organisation before a big change, let it run, and see whether the change creates freedom or friction, and parked it until the rest is settled. Not a prediction of the future, which no living thing allows, but a rehearsal. It isn't built yet.

What it would take to count as living

Calling an organisation alive is easy. Earning the word is harder. Biologists list what living things do: they keep a boundary, take in what they need and move it to where it's needed, sense their surroundings, keep themselves steady, repair damage, learn, adapt, grow, reproduce and die. If the living picture is more than a metaphor, an organisation on The Grove should be able to say how it does each of those. Here's where it stands.

A boundary. The membrane is real in the system. Work is weighed by how it crossed, people join by invitation and leave freely, and a seat is the clear edge of who decides.

Taking in and circulating. Work arrives at the edge and is routed to the part that answers for it. Money comes in and goes to a shared commons, and from there to the parts that need it, by proposal, as Chapter 17 describes. The part that earns doesn't keep the food for itself.

Sensing. The read, described above, and the Field, where people sense together, are its senses: one reads what the work does, the other hears what people notice.

Keeping steady. When one of the organisation's own measures leaves its usual range, it becomes one piece of work on the branch it's about, never a stream of alarms, and its strength follows the reading. Closing it takes words: what was found, and what's being done or why this level is right. If the reading is still out of range four weeks later, it opens again one branch up, so nobody can quiet a signal about their own part with a story. Left untouched for two weeks, it rises. Once the reading has been back in its range for two weeks, it clears itself. It works much as a hormone does: a graded signal that keeps nudging until the body comes back into balance. And changes are damped, so the organisation doesn't chase its own tail.

Repair. When a part is damaged, something else takes the strain. An empty seat falls to the branch above, so the work always has someone who answers for it. Work at risk can be taken by whoever holds the branch above. A promise that slips rises until someone steps in. Someone who leaves takes nothing with them that the organisation needs: their work goes back to its branch. And a tension nobody answers climbs, a forum at a time, until somebody does.

Learning. Every change is looked back on about four weeks after it's made: did it land, what did we learn, keep it, change it or stop it? Playbooks, the organisation's ways of doing things, are revised from what happens. Bets are reshaped by what comes back. And the learning pulse watches whether the organisation is getting better at learning, not just busier.

Adapting. Its shape changes when the work shows it should: parts grow, split, merge and fold, each by a decision people can see.

Defending itself. The few guardrails act like an immune system. Money can't buy a say. Nobody can seat themselves. Personal details of outsiders are refused where the whole organisation would read them. A newcomer brought in to swing things can be questioned and put on hold.

Growing, reproducing and dying. Branches are born, divide and end by folding into their parent, with nothing dropped. Organisations giving rise to new organisations is designed and not yet built, and closing a whole organisation isn't designed at all, as Chapter 24 says plainly.

Remembering. What it knows lives in its branch documents and its record, written as the work happens, as Chapter 23 describes.

One honest caveat. A careful critic of our early wording pointed out that something can organise itself without being alive: a living thing also nourishes, repairs and renews itself, and in an organisation much of that is done by people. That's true, and it's the design. The system carries the signals, the routes and the clocks. Wise-Eye, the AI beside every steward, carries much of the load: reading what arrives, routing it, keeping track of what's at risk. People do the sensing, the repairing, the caring and the deciding. Put together, it's an organism powered by people and AI at once. That's as close to alive as we dare claim. Whether it deserves the word in a biologist's strict sense, we're happy to leave open. In the ways that matter for the people inside it, it behaves like something alive, and it can't do that without them.

How we decided

From the very first design, we chose the living picture over the machine. It was the first thing written down, before any code, and everything else rests on it.

Choosing it was easy. Living with it was harder. Two questions took real argument.

The first was whether an organisation has a boundary at all. People in The Grove can belong to many organisations at once. Organisations can split, merge and overlap. For a while it seemed the boundary might dissolve entirely. We settled on the membrane: many boundaries, one for each kind of thing that crosses, open for ideas and information, clear and firm for decisions, seats and money. Later, reading the sociocracy teacher Ted Rau's work on organisations as social systems, we sharpened it further.³ The organisation is a whirlpool in an ocean, and its boundary isn't the same thing as its purpose. Purpose says what it exists to serve. The boundary says what lies where.

The second was how far to trust the reading. If an organisation can be read, it can also be watched, and watching people is the fastest way to kill the honesty that makes the reading worth having. So we drew hard lines. No reading is ever about a person. Nothing the reading shows ever feeds directly into a decision, someone's pay or their place. It informs; people decide. And we chose the word rehearse rather than predict. A map that claims to be the territory is dangerous. A map that says here's what we see, what do you make of it? is useful.

We also kept in mind what Chapter 4 warned about. Nature is beautiful and ruthless. A living picture of an organisation mustn't become an excuse to let parts of it, or the people in them, wither without care. The living picture tells us how organisations behave. It doesn't tell us how to treat people. That part we added ourselves.

What you might take from this

An organisation isn't a machine you design and run. It's more like a living pattern that keeps re-forming around a purpose, with many boundaries, parts that are also wholes, and a life cycle of its own.

Seen that way, it can be read like a living thing: from what happens to the work, never from watching the people.

Notes and further reading

On the metaphors we use for organisations and what they hide: Morgan, G. (1986), Images of Organization, Sage. On companies as living things: de Geus, A. (1997), The Living Company, Harvard Business School Press. On order arising in systems far from equilibrium, like the whirlpool: Prigogine, I. and Stengers, I. (1984), Order Out of Chaos, Bantam. On humanity as one organism being born, and crises as birth pangs: Hubbard, B. M. (1998), Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential, New World Library. On the learning organisation and seeing the whole: Senge, P. M. (1990), The Fifth Discipline, Doubleday. On life as networks rather than machines: Capra, F. (1996), The Web of Life, Anchor Books.

Chapter 6. Why an operating system

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 culture alone erodes under pressure, and what written practices like Holacracy ask of people
• What it means to run on an operating system, with each organisation's shape held as its own data
• Why the work flows through the structure, rather than past a map beside it
• Which few guardrails live in the structure itself, and how a founder's last word was closed off
• How the network is meant to be run by its members, like Visa, and where it stands today
• Why the Internet Computer: independence all the way through, with no single owner beneath the organisation who could take it away or use it as leverage

If you've followed us this far, you might agree with most of it and still have a fair objection.

All of this sounds like culture. Living organisations, sensing and responding, people taking up responsibility rather than having it handed to them: these are questions of how people behave and what they believe. Culture is built through leadership, conversation, trust and time. It isn't something you can install. If anything, the history of organisational change is littered with software that promised to transform how people work and ended up as one more system to log into.

So why build an operating system at all?

What culture alone costs

We have a lot of respect for culture. But we've also watched what happens to it under pressure.

A team agrees to make decisions together. It works well for a while. Then a deadline lands, someone senior is anxious, and a decision gets made in a corridor. Nobody objects, because it's urgent and it's only this once. Next time it's easier. Within a year the team is deciding things the old way and talking about the new way at offsites.

This isn't a failure of good intentions. It's what happens when the only thing holding a new way of working in place is everyone's goodwill on a bad day. Old habits have generations behind them. New ones have a workshop and a poster.

The practices that went furthest beyond hierarchy knew this, which is why they wrote things down. Holacracy has a constitution, roles written with their purpose and accountabilities, a governance process with its own rules, and meetings with a facilitator and a secretary to keep it all honest.¹ It's a serious answer to the drift. But it asks a lot of people. Someone has to run the meetings. Someone has to keep the records. Someone has to know the rules well enough to spot when they're being bent. And the record of how the organisation is meant to work usually lives in a separate place from the work itself: a map of the organisation, consulted now and then, while the real work happens in email, chat and spreadsheets.

When people get busy, the map falls out of date, the meetings slip, and the old shape grows back underneath.

The thing everything else runs on

Think about the computer you use every day. You probably don't think much about its operating system. You open a window, and a programme runs. You save a file, and it's there tomorrow. Two programmes don't overwrite each other's work. One crashing doesn't take the others down. None of that happens because the programmes are well behaved. It happens because the operating system underneath provides the means for them to run, and the rules they have to run within.

That's the kind of thing we set out to build: not another tool that sits on top of an organisation, but the layer underneath that organisations run on. An organisational runtime.

The comparison holds further than you might expect.

The hardware is a blockchain, the Internet Computer. When The Grove opens to everyone, each organisation will be its own independent DAO: its own small, self-contained piece of that network, running its own copy of the operating system, with its own DNA growing in it, and controlled by nobody else. That's the shape The Grove goes live in. Before then, while we test the design, the experience, scale and security, the organisations on The Grove are simulated ones, seeded, grown and run by AI people. That's a test bench, not the live system.

That makes every organisation on The Grove a DAO from its first day: a decentralised autonomous organisation, whose rules are carried out by code its people agreed rather than by an officer. Even on the test bench its rules run as code; what going live adds is the independence. Most DAOs ask their members to buy tokens, hold a crypto wallet and pay a fee, often called gas, every time they act. Nobody in an organisation on The Grove does any of that. The only part of the blockchain anyone touches is signing in, with Internet Identity, the Internet Computer's own way of proving it's you, using the passkey on your phone or laptop rather than a password. Nobody holds a token, pays to act or handles cryptocurrency, and the organisation's money stays in its own bank. The blockchain is underneath, doing its job, and out of sight.

The governance is where the difference runs deepest. Most DAOs decide by token: one token, one vote. So whoever holds the most tokens holds the most say, and say can simply be bought. Much of what has gone wrong with DAOs follows from that. Votes cluster in a few large holders, most members stop taking part, and in the worst cases someone buys or borrows enough tokens to push through a proposal that empties the treasury. In 2022 an attacker did exactly that to a project called Beanstalk, borrowing the votes for a single transaction. In an organisation on The Grove, money can never buy a say. The say comes from trust that peers give and can take back, consent from the people who carry the work, advice from those it touches, and a clock on every stage, as the chapters on decisions and trust describe. That is a different thing from a token vote, and it's the main reason we think a DAO can work for ordinary organisations at all.

The operating system provides the means an organisation needs to run: ways to sense what's happening, make decisions, route work to where it belongs, keep promises, handle money, and see itself whole. And it provides the guardrails: the few rules every organisation carries, which stop it drifting back into the old shape when people are tired or under pressure. And it's agentic. Its AI, Wise-Eye, is built in beside every seat, so an organisation has a companion that reads, routes, drafts, makes sense of what's happening and learns how this organisation works, from the day it's planted, without anyone having to integrate one. Chapter 22 says where.

The programmes are each organisation's DNA: its purpose, its parts, its agreements, its playbooks, the way its work is done. That's what runs on the system, and it's what makes an organisation that organisation rather than any other. It's data, written and changed by the people in the organisation, through the organisation's own processes. The system doesn't decide what shape an organisation should be. It runs whatever DNA the organisation grows, and makes it easy to change.

And each organisation's files are its own records: what it decided, what it promised, what it learned, kept as the work happens. The organisation itself is its people, with its DNA running beneath them.

Working in it, not on it

There's a difference between a map of an organisation and the place where the organisation actually works.

Most tools for self-management are maps. They record the roles, the circles, the policies. You go there to look things up, and to change the structure in a governance meeting. Then you go back to your email to do the work.

From the start, we wanted the opposite. Work arrives in the organisation and goes straight to the part that answers for it. A proposal to change how things are done is made where the work is happening, by the people doing it. The structure isn't a diagram beside the work; it's the thing the work flows through. So when the structure is wrong, you feel it in the work, and the work itself shows where.

That's the deeper reason for an operating system rather than a tool. A tool is something you pick up and put down. An operating system is where you are. And because each organisation on The Grove is a DAO, its decisions, its records and its rules living in its own running code, The Grove isn't something the organisation uses. It's the form the organisation takes.

Guardrails, not instructions

The guardrails are worth a closer look, because they're the answer to the culture objection.

The legal scholar Lawrence Lessig made an argument in the late 1990s that has only grown more relevant: in the digital world, code regulates behaviour as surely as law does.² The way a system is built makes some things easy, some things hard and some things impossible, whatever anyone intends.

That cuts both ways. Most software for organisations quietly enforces hierarchy: approval chains, managers who can see their reports' work but not the other way round, dashboards built for the top. Nobody voted for any of it. It's just how the tools were built.

So we built the other way. It's easiest to see in a moment.

Picture a small organisation on The Grove, a few months old. The person who started it holds the root, the seat that carries the organisation's purpose. Two others hold seats on the parts beneath it. A large order has come in, and the founder knows exactly who should take on the new kitchen work: herself. So she starts a proposal to seat herself on that part.

It doesn't go through. The words she sees are plain: a seat is never taken by your own proposal. Someone else seated in the forum around that branch's parent has to raise it, and when it's decided, she stands aside from it, because it's about her.

That isn't a policy she forgot to read. There's no setting that turns it off, and nobody to ask for an exception, because there's nobody above the forum to ask.

The same goes for the shortcut everyone takes when a deadline lands, the decision made in a corridor. With two people seated in a forum, nothing passes the moment one of them says yes. There's a window of two days in which the other can see it and answer. A concern holds the change until it's met, reshaped or lifted by the person who raised it, and nobody else can lift it for them. A change big enough to matter waits a few more days after it's agreed, and a concern raised in those days stops it. Each time we found a place where a founder could quietly keep the last word, we closed it. At one point a founder could add new structure in a single step, with no measure and no look back. Now that step is refused.

There's no override anywhere: no veto, no administrator, no emergency switch. The obvious question is what happens when the building's on fire, and we come back to it when we look at decisions in Chapter 11.

A founder alone still decides alone. There's nobody else to ask, and pretending otherwise would be theatre. The rules begin to bite the moment a second person takes a seat, and that's deliberate. The guardrails don't stop you starting. They stop you staying the boss.

A few more things are held the same way. Money can fund the work but can't buy a say: the money and the say are kept apart in the system, with no way to turn one into the other. Nobody inside an organisation can quietly change the rules for everyone else. And no reading of the organisation is ever about a person.

We should be honest that not everything is held this way. Some of what keeps Wise-Eye, the system's AI, in its place is structure: it has no way to consent to a proposal, so it can't. Some of it is words: its guidance asks it never to tell people what they should do, and that holds only as long as the model listens. Thomas Thomison, who co-founded HolacracyOne, puts the difference well: a prompt is not a constitution.³ Wherever it matters, we've tried to move a rule from the second kind to the first. When we caught Wise-Eye writing a customer's phone number into guidance the whole organisation reads, we didn't write it a better instruction. The system now refuses to keep it.

That's the answer to the culture objection. Not that culture doesn't matter, but that a tired team on a bad Friday shouldn't need to remember the rules for the rules to hold.

Everything else is left to the organisation. The guardrails are few, on purpose. They mark the edges of the road, not the route.

Run by its members, like Visa

There's one more question: who runs the system?

If one company owns the platform that organisations run on, that company holds all the power, however good its intentions. It can change the rules, raise the price, or be bought by someone with different intentions. An operating system for organisations without bosses would have quietly put a boss back on top of all of them.

The nearest model we found is an unlikely one: Visa. In the late 1960s, Dee Hock helped turn a struggling credit card programme into an organisation owned and governed by the banks that used it, neither a single company nor a free-for-all, which he later called chaordic: a blend of chaos and order.⁴ The network existed because its members ran it together.

The Grove is designed on a similar idea, and this is the part we're furthest from finishing. The plan is that organisations form a network by recognising each other. The network has a Steward, in place from the day The Grove goes live, which is itself an organisation like any other, bound by the same rules, whose job is to look after the system's code for the organisations that use it. Every organisation will carry the system with it, sealed inside its own space. Nobody will be able to push changes into an organisation; each will decide for itself whether to adopt a new version. And if a Steward ever stopped serving its network, the organisations could leave together, take the system with them, and form a network of their own.

That isn't how the test bench works. While the organisations are simulated and we're still testing, they share one space and we can change the code they all run on, because we need to. Going live means the shape above: each organisation its own DAO, running its own copy, making its own choices. We built the organisation first and the network second, because a network of organisations that can't yet run themselves would be worth nothing. Until The Grove goes live, that gap is real, and we'd rather name it than have you find it.

How the network will work, and why it isn't simply open source, is a story for later in the book. For now the point is simple. The system is being designed so that capturing it would be worthless.

How we decided

We didn't start out building an operating system. We started with governance: a way for an organisation to run itself without a boss, expressed in code. Very early, we found that governance alone wasn't enough. An organisation that can make decisions but can't route its work, keep its promises or see its own state isn't much of an organisation. Layer by layer, what began as governance became the whole runtime.

We argued about the word. Platform sounded like someone else's property. Tool sounded like something you could put down. App sounded small. Operating system was the only term that captured both halves: the means to run, and the rules to run within. Holacracy's creators had used it too, for a practice written on paper.¹ We wanted one that actually runs.

We also had to decide how much to build in. It would have been easy to encode a particular way of organising, ours, and make every organisation follow it. We chose not to. The guardrails are the few things we believe must hold for any organisation without a boss to stay that way. Everything else is the organisation's own DNA. The code is only the ground it grows in.

And we chose a blockchain not because it's fashionable but because it answers a specific question: where can an organisation live so that nobody, including us, can switch it off, read its private records or change its rules from outside? Put another way: how does an organisation stay independent all the way down, with no single owner beneath it, of servers, software or sign-in, who could take it away or use it as leverage? The Internet Computer answered that better than anything else we looked at, for six reasons.

• No single point of control. Most businesses today run on tools that sit in a few large clouds. When one of those has a bad day, thousands of businesses go down together, and whoever owns the servers sets the terms. On the Internet Computer, a piece of software, called a canister, runs on many machines at once, held by independent operators in different countries, and they have to agree on every change to its state. No one of them can switch it off or quietly alter it.
• Room for a whole system. The smart contracts most DAOs run on are tiny. On Ethereum, a contract's code is capped at twenty-four kilobytes: room for a voting rule, not an organisation. A canister holds a full application and its data, which is why the whole operating system, guardrails and all, lives in one place rather than spread across contracts and outside servers.
• One place, not a stack. The canister itself serves the page people use, the organisation's own website, and the data behind both. There's no separate web host or database to run, secure or lose.
• The organisation pays, not its people. A canister pays for its own computing, from a balance topped up in advance and priced against ordinary currencies rather than a token's swings. That's what lets members act without wallets or fees.
• Signing in that protects people. Internet Identity uses the passkey already on a phone or laptop, so there's no password to steal, and it gives each person a different identity on every site, so they can't be followed from one to the next.
• Only its controllers can change it. A canister's code can be replaced only by whoever controls it, and the network keeps a public fingerprint of the code that's installed, so a change can't happen unseen. At go-live, control passes to each organisation's own decision-making, so its code changes only when its people decide it should.

Each of these takes away one thing an organisation would otherwise depend on someone else for: the servers, the size of what it can hold, the hosting, the fees, the sign-in, and the right to change its code. Together they're what independence all the way through means. This is what Chapter 1 meant by a sovereign organisation: nothing it stands on is owned by someone who could pull it away. Keeping a boss from growing inside is the guardrails' job, and a different one. The last is the one that completes it, and it's the property we're building towards. We aren't there yet.

What you might take from this

Culture matters, but culture alone erodes under pressure. Rules that live in the structure of the system itself don't depend on everyone's goodwill on a bad day.

Independence has to run all the way down. An organisation without a boss inside can still have one outside: whoever owns the servers, the software or the sign-in it can't do without. So the question to ask of any foundation is who could take it away, or use it as leverage, and the answer we're building towards is nobody. That's what makes an organisation sovereign.

That's why an operating system: the means to run without a boss, and the few guardrails that stop the boss growing back.

Notes and further reading

On the social potential movement, the step from what one person can become to what we can become together: Hubbard, B. M. (1998), Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential, New World Library. On how token voting concentrates power in DAOs, and where it has failed: Buterin, V. (2021), "Moving beyond coin voting governance", vitalik.ca.

Chapter 7. The spark

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 responsibility handed down can be handed back, and where it actually starts
• What source theory says about the person who acts first, and where we part from it
• How seats are offered, filled and shared by crews, and what happens when nobody steps forward
• What a steward is, and whether the root sits above anyone
• How Wise-Eye carries the admin while people keep every decision

Here's the objection we hear more than any other.

Without a boss, nobody takes responsibility. When everyone is in charge, no one is. Work falls between the cracks because it's always someone else's job. Hard decisions get put off because nobody wants to make them. And when something goes wrong, there's nobody to hold to account.

It's a serious worry, and it isn't imaginary. Most of us have been in a meeting where a problem was obvious to everyone and owned by no one. Most of us have seen a shared kitchen.

So before we go any further into how an organisation on The Grove works, we need to talk about where it starts: with people, and with what makes them step forward.

Where responsibility actually lives

In a traditional organisation, responsibility flows down with authority. The boss is responsible for the department, the manager for the team, the team member for their tasks. Each person answers to the one above.

It looks tidy. In practice it does something odd. Because responsibility is handed down, it can also be handed back. "That's above my pay grade." "I was told to do it this way." "Not my department." The structure gives everyone a reason to hold only the slice they were given and let go of the rest. Meanwhile, the people at the top carry far more than anyone can, and quietly burn out under it.

There's a different way of seeing responsibility, and it comes from looking at how things actually get started.

The person who acted

In the 1980s, a consultant named Peter Koenig began studying a simple question: when something new comes into the world, who is it that brings it? Not who had the idea, because ideas are cheap and often occur to many people at once. Who took the risk of acting on it?

He called that person the source. Later writers, especially Tom Nixon and Stefan Merckelbach, developed his work into a practical way of seeing organisations.¹ Every initiative has a source: the person who first stepped forward and took responsibility for it. Around them, others become the source of particular parts. The source doesn't own the initiative, and isn't a boss. Their job is to listen for what the whole needs, hold its boundaries, and hand parts of it on when the time comes.

What's striking about this view is that responsibility isn't given. It's taken. Nobody appoints the source. They become it by acting.

And when the formal structure doesn't match who's really carrying things, trouble follows. Some people hold authority without taking any initiative. Others take initiative and have no authority to finish what they started. Merckelbach describes two ways it goes wrong: the despot, who never lets go of anything; and the vacuum, where everyone is equal and nobody leads, so nothing gets decided.

We take a great deal from this, and part company with it in places. Source theory gives the person who started something a lasting role as its source, the one who listens for the whole. On The Grove, a founder's vision is treated as a set of hypotheses to test rather than a picture to hold. The founder's seat is one others can share. And nobody holds the whole by right of having started it. We come back to where those differences lead later in the book.

Seats, not jobs

In an organisation on The Grove, the work is organised into parts we call branches, which we'll meet properly in Chapter 9. Each branch has a purpose and the things it's accountable for. Each has a seat. Decisions about branches are made in forums, and forums are made of people, not branches. A branch is governed in one forum: the stewards of its parent and of its sibling branches, with its own steward taking part as a person, and never the people below it. The root has no parent, so it's governed by its own stewards and the stewards of the branches grown directly from it.

A seat isn't a job title. It's something you hold. You can hold more than one. Two or three people can share one. You step into it because you want to carry what it carries, and you can step out of it when you need to, without anyone's permission. The work you had in hand goes back to the branch, so it isn't dropped.

Nobody is assigned a seat. Seats are offered: a part of the organisation says it needs someone, people say they'd like to take it on, and the people already holding the parts around it agree. It's closer to an invitation than an appointment, and that matters. Responsibility that's chosen feels different from responsibility that's imposed. People who choose a seat tend to carry all of it, not just the slice they were told about.

The details show the care. Whoever holds the seat, or the branch above while it's empty, posts that it's open. Members say they'd like it. Seating someone is always a proposal, heard in the forum around the branch's parent, and raised by someone seated there. The person being seated stands aside from deciding it, because it's about them. And only one change to a branch's seat is open at a time, so nobody is swapped out while someone else is being swapped in.

What happens when nobody steps forward? That's the shared kitchen, the case the sceptic fears most. An empty seat falls to the branch above, so the work always has someone who answers for it. And a seat left empty for two weeks is one of the signs that makes the organisation read a branch as untended, so the gap shows rather than hides.

When several people share a seat, they're a crew. They each take part as people, but in the forum they share they weigh as one seat. If two of a crew of three consent, they carry two thirds of that seat's weight, not the weight of two people. So a big team can't outvote a small one just by being big.

And because the work is assigned to the seat, not to the person, nobody is ever handed a pile of tasks by someone above them. Work arrives at the part of the organisation that answers for it. Whoever holds that seat takes it up.

The steward

We call the person holding a seat its steward.

The word was chosen with care. A steward isn't an owner. They don't possess the part of the organisation they hold; they look after it on behalf of the whole, for as long as they hold the seat. And a steward isn't a manager. Their job isn't to produce results with their own hands, or to tell others what to do. It's to tend the conditions in which the work can thrive: making sure the right work reaches the part, that what it needs is there, that what's growing gets room and what's fading is let go.

Holding a seat isn't a job, either. It's closer to a role you play, sometimes several at once, often alongside your other work. Whoever plants an organisation on The Grove holds its first seat, the root, which carries the organisation's purpose and anything that hasn't yet found a home. That's because someone has to hold it at the start, not because it belongs to them. The root is stewardship of the whole, and that may not be where a founder belongs. Founders are often several people, and the one with the energy to start something isn't always the one best placed to tend the whole once it's growing. Whoever holds the root can step down and pass it on; the system only insists that it's never left with nobody in it.

The honest answer to whether the root is above anyone has two halves. In decisions, it isn't: the root is one seat in a forum it shares with the branches just beneath it, and its voice weighs the same as theirs. In structure, it is: work with no home rests there, tensions nobody has answered end there, and only its forum can change the purpose. So the root isn't a boss, but it carries more than it looks. The quickest way for a founder to stop carrying it alone is for others to take up seats, including a share of the root itself, so that what it was holding moves out to the people who are now carrying it.

In one of our early test conversations, a role-played founder bringing his small company onto The Grove asked, half joking, whether holding the root made him the boss. The answer, and the whole design, is no. It makes him the person holding the purpose until others share it.

The spark and the co-pilot

There's a reason we call this chapter the spark.

In an organisation on The Grove, people are the spark. They're the ones who sense what matters, who care, who imagine what could be, who decide. That's not a role that can be automated, and it's not one we'd want to.

But a great deal of what fills a working week isn't that. It's admin: chasing replies, filing things in the right place, remembering what was promised to whom, drafting the same email for the fifth time, working out where a piece of work should go. In most organisations that load falls on whoever holds things together, and it crowds out exactly the human part.

So every steward has a companion beside them. We call it Wise-Eye. It reads what's arriving, prepares what's needed, drafts replies, routes work to where it belongs, keeps track of what the organisation has promised and what's at risk, and offers a view of how things are going. It works on behalf of the part the steward holds, and says so. It can take on more as it earns trust, one kind of work at a time, but only when the steward chooses.

What it never does is decide. It can draft a proposal; it can't consent to one. It can offer advice on a proposal; it can't raise a concern, and it can't block anything. It's a facilitator, not a fixer: it asks more than it tells, and offers guidance mostly when asked. The spark stays human. The load moves to the co-pilot.

We'll look at Wise-Eye properly in Chapter 22. It's introduced here because it changes what it means to hold a seat. Holding a part of the organisation no longer means carrying all its admin alone. It means being free to do the part only a person can do.

Founders who don't want to be bosses

One kind of person turns up again and again around The Grove: the founder who doesn't want to become the boss.

They've usually worked for one. Some have been one, and didn't like who they became. They have an idea, a purpose, something they want to bring into the world, and they want to do it with others as equals. But every path they know ends in hierarchy: hire people, manage them, become the bottleneck.

For them, the shift is subtle but freeing. They're the source of the organisation, alone or with others; they took the risk of starting it. They often hold its purpose at the beginning, though not necessarily for long, and not necessarily at the root. But their vision is treated as a set of hypotheses to test against the world, not a plan everyone has to follow. And from the first day, the organisation is built to let others take up seats, share the root, and carry parts of the whole as their own.

There's a picture here we owe to Barbara Marx Hubbard, who saw the world's crises as a birth rather than an ending. If an organisation is something being born, the founder is closer to a midwife than an owner: essential at the start, present through the hardest part, and not the one who decides what the new life becomes.

We should be plain about the beginning, though. A founder alone decides alone, because there's nobody else to ask. The same is true while others have joined but nobody else holds a seat, and that's exactly where the boss grows back by default. What pushes against it is the design: branches that can post their own open seats, a root that can be shared, and work that goes to branches rather than to people, so there's always somewhere for someone else to step in. The rules start to bite the moment a second person takes a seat.

The founder is the spark that lights it. They don't have to be the fire.

How we decided

The language took longer than almost anything else.

We started with gardening words: stewards as gardeners tending conditions, organisations as seeds, branches that bloom and fade. They captured something true about the role, and we still use some of them in the deeper story. But when we tested them, people found them hard to say out loud at a family lunch or in a business meeting. Nobody wants to tell a client they're the organisation's gardener. So in the product we moved to plain words, and kept the metaphors for where they help understanding.

We also had to decide how far to go in removing assignment. It would have been simpler to let someone allocate seats and hand out work, at least at the start. We decided against it entirely. Seats are offered and accepted. Work goes to parts, not people. A founder alone holds everything only because there's nobody else yet, and the design pushes, gently and constantly, towards sharing.

And we had to decide where AI stops. The easy path, and the one much of the technology industry is taking, is to let AI make more and more decisions because it's faster. We drew the line early and have kept it: AI proposes, people decide. Wise-Eye can draft, advise and do the work it's been trusted with. It never consents, never blocks and never holds a seat. Its standing is something people grant, a piece of work at a time, and can take back.

What you might take from this

Responsibility doesn't have to be handed down. It can be taken up, by people who choose a seat because they want to carry it.

When the seat is offered rather than imposed, and a co-pilot carries the load, people step forward. The spark stays human.

Notes and further reading

On how leadership and responsibility can be distributed: Laloux, F. (2014), Reinventing Organizations, Nelson Parker. For a lively conversation about source and self-management, the Islands of Resonance podcast episode on leading from source (in German), with Dennis Wittrock and Tobias Klose.

Interlude. One Tuesday

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 interlude

• One ordinary working day in a small bike workshop whose organisation runs on The Grove
• How a customer's email finds the right branch, and a drafted reply waits for a person
• How work passed back and forth shows up as a tension that blames nobody
• How a promise gets a name and a day, and a proposal runs on clocks, not meetings
• How the change is looked back on four weeks later, and which chapters explain each step

Before we go inside, piece by piece, here is one ordinary working day. Nothing dramatic happens in it. That's the point.

Kestrel Cycles is a small workshop in a market town. It mends bikes, sells refurbished ones, and runs evening classes for people who want to look after their own. Ruth started it and still holds the root, the part of the organisation that holds the whole. Beneath it sit three branches. Repairs is held by Tomasz, with Jun and Sam as his crew. Sales is held by Ade. Classes is held by Lena. Six people in all, and a purpose they wrote together: keeping bikes on the road.

Twenty to eight

An email arrives from a customer called Amira. She bought a refurbished bike from Kestrel three weeks ago. The gears have started slipping, she's riding to the coast on Saturday, and could someone look at it before then?

It comes in through the same door as everything else that reaches the organisation. Wise-Eye reads it first, and asks what the work is rather than what it mentions. It mentions a sale, and Sales is right there. But what it asks for is a repair, and Repairs has written down that it answers for repairing customers' bikes. That's this. So it lands on Repairs in one step, as a match, not a guess.

Wise-Eye drafts a reply beside it. It knows Amira's name and when she bought the bike, because the organisation already has her earlier messages. What it doesn't know is when anyone can look at it, and it doesn't make that up. Where the day should be, the draft says [a day we can look at it], in square brackets, and waits for a person.

Nine o'clock

Tomasz reads it over his first coffee. Between them, he, Jun and Sam have already said yes to more than they comfortably can this week. And a bike three weeks out of the shop feels to him like Sales' to look after. So he passes it on to Sales, with a line saying why.

Nobody hands it to Ade. It sits on Sales, where whoever holds Sales can take it up.

Eleven

Ade sees it and passes it straight back. It's a repair. Sales doesn't have the stand or the tools. He says so, kindly, in a line of his own.

Both of them are right. That's what makes it worth noticing.

The email has been passed on once and come back. On its own, one trip there and back wouldn't show as anything. But a bike sold in September went the same way a fortnight ago, and recent passes weigh more than old ones. Taken together, it's enough. The next morning, in the heads-up waiting for each person in the forum that covers both branches, there's a new line. Here that forum is the root's: Ruth, Tomasz, Ade and Lena. The line says, more or less, that work keeps passing between Sales and Repairs, and the line between them may be in the wrong place.

Notice what it doesn't say. Nobody dropped anything. Nobody was slow or awkward. A tension like this is read as the map being wrong, never as a person, and none of them has to defend themselves before they can think about it.

Half past eleven

Back on Repairs, Jun opens the draft again. If Amira brings the bike in on Thursday, Jun can come in early on Friday and have it ready by noon. Jun fills the gap, reads the reply once more, and sends it.

That sending is the moment a promise is made. It belongs to Repairs, because Repairs answers for the work. It's carried by Jun, because Jun approved it, and a promise is carried by whoever made it. It has a day, Friday, and a step with a latest start worked back from that day. If the start passes and nobody has the bike in hand, the step reads as at risk and says so, once, in the root's conversation, where anyone holding the branch above may step in. Nothing buzzes on anyone's phone. Jun doesn't need it to. Jun's name is on it, and Jun feels that.

On Friday, a little before noon, Amira wheels the bike out. Jun marks the promise kept.

Wednesday

Tomasz has a seat in the root's forum, because Repairs sits beneath the root. Reading the line in his heads-up, he recognises it. He drafts a proposal.

The tension, in his words: bikes we've sold have nobody to look after them once they leave. The change: a new accountability for Repairs, looking after bikes we've sold, in their first three months. He tries to send it without saying how they'd know it worked, and it won't go. A new accountability has to name a measure it expects to move, and it can't be one the change moves just by being made. He names one: customers chasing us about a bike they bought here, expected to go down.

Ade checks its shape that afternoon. Not whether it's a good idea, only whether it's clear and does what its words say. It's someone other than Tomasz, as it has to be. He agrees it.

Then advice. Tomasz sets three days, the shortest a proposal can. It's put to Jun and Sam, because it changes the branch they hold, and to the people the organisation knows to have skill in how its parts are shaped. Advice would close sooner if everyone asked had answered. Sam takes the full three days, and asks whether three months should be six. Tomasz thinks about it and keeps three, saying why: start small, and let the review tell them. Had he reworked it, it would have gone back to be checked and advised again. Advice is there to be heard, not obeyed.

The vote

The forum that decides is the one around Repairs' parent, the root: the people who hold the root's seat and the seats of the branches grown from it, Repairs, Sales and Classes. So Tomasz, who holds Repairs' seat, takes part as a person in deciding a change to his own branch. Adding an accountability is a low-impact change, so it passes when the people consenting carry a fifth of the forum's trust in this kind of matter and no concern stands. In a forum of four, one person's word could be enough on its own. That's exactly why the vote stays open for two days whatever happens: nobody can pass a change the moment it opens.

Ruth, Ade and Tomasz consent on the first day. Lena says nothing. She's busy with a class and has no harm to name. When the two days end, enough of the forum's trust has said yes and no concern stands, so the change is made. Lena's silence didn't block it, and it didn't count as a yes either. It doesn't wait any longer than that. Only a high-impact change waits out a three-day timelock first, and this isn't one.

Nobody held a meeting. Nobody needed to.

Four weeks on

Twenty-eight days after the change is made, its review comes round, open for a week. Everyone who took part is asked the same questions. Did it land? What did we learn? Keep it, change it, or stop it?

Beside the questions sits the measure Tomasz named at the start. Customers chasing about a bike they'd bought have gone from a handful a month to one. The line about Sales and Repairs has stopped showing. Sam notes that two of the bikes that came back were just past three months, and wonders again about six. They keep the accountability as it is, and what Sam noticed goes into what they learned, where it'll be found if the question comes back.

That's the whole of it. An email, a pass and a return, a promise with a name and a day, a tension that blamed nobody, a change that ran on clocks rather than meetings, and a look back that asked whether it worked.

Each of those steps gets its own chapter in Part three. How a branch says what it answers for is Chapter 9, The branch. How work finds the part of the organisation that answers for it is Chapter 13, Work that finds its way. How a proposal moves through its clocks is Chapter 11, Making decisions, and the trust that weighs the consent is Chapter 12, Trust. The measure as a bet to be tested is Chapter 14, Vision as hypothesis, and the promise and the person carrying it are Chapter 15, Promises. How the organisation read the tension in the first place waits for Part four.

Chapter 8. Purpose: what closes, what explores

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 most purpose statements end up as wallpaper, and what that costs
• How a purpose is found, and why an organisation can't be planted without one
• Why purpose holds still while the founder's vision is tested as a set of bets
• How every branch carries a purpose, why the root's rarely changes, and how the lens reads drift
• What happens to work beside the purpose, and why purpose isn't the boundary

Walk into almost any office reception and you'll find it on the wall. A sentence about excellence, or customers, or making a difference. It was agreed at an away day, polished by a consultant, printed and framed. And on an ordinary Tuesday, nobody inside the building could tell you what it says.

So the sceptic's view is fair: purpose statements are wallpaper. They're written to sound good, not to decide anything. When a real choice comes up, about which client to take or which project to drop, nobody reaches for the purpose. They reach for the budget, the targets, or the person in charge. If that's what purpose is, building an organisation around it sounds like building a house on a slogan.

We think the sceptic is right about most purpose statements. This chapter is about why, and what happens when a purpose is asked to do real work.

What wallpaper costs

A purpose becomes wallpaper when something else is doing its job. In most organisations, that something is a boss. Direction comes from the person above you: what to work on this quarter, what matters more than what, which opportunity to chase. The purpose statement sits alongside, harmless, because nothing depends on it.

That arrangement has costs, and they're easy to miss because they're so familiar.

The first is drift. Without a purpose that decides, an organisation follows whatever pays or whatever its loudest people want. A charity built to help one group of people finds itself running whatever programme a funder will back this year. A software company that started out to solve one problem becomes a shop for any feature a large customer asks for. Each step looks sensible. Ten steps later, nobody quite remembers why the organisation exists.

The second is the confusion of purpose with plan. Many organisations write a purpose that's really a destination: become the market leader, reach a million users, open ten sites. A destination can be reached, and then what? Or it can be missed, and then the organisation feels like a failure even when it's doing good work. Either way, a destination can't guide the hundred small choices made on the way.

The third cost falls on people. When direction comes from a person, people learn to read that person. They spend energy guessing what the boss wants, and they stop asking what the work needs. The ones who care most about why the organisation exists are often the most frustrated, because the official reason and the real one have quietly come apart.

A seed that has to be found

As Chapter 7 described, an organisation on The Grove has no boss handing down direction. Something has to carry it instead. That something is the purpose.

This is the turn. In a self-managing organisation, purpose isn't decoration. It's the thing that tells a steward whether a piece of work belongs, whether a new part of the organisation is worth growing, whether a request should be taken up or gently set aside. If it can't do that, nothing else will, and the organisation will drift or quietly grow a boss to fill the gap.

So we made purpose the first thing, not the last. In The Grove, the seed is the purpose: an organisation can't be planted without at least a working one. Wise-Eye, the companion, helps a founder find it in the very first conversation.

Finding it is harder than it sounds. In one of our test conversations, a small software team brought their company onto The Grove. Their purpose didn't come from asking them to write a mission statement. It came from asking what their company's name meant. They were called Essential. Essential for what? The answer that emerged was something like this: to provide what people need, to ease their lives, and to stay close enough to see the value of it.

Notice what that sentence does and doesn't do. It doesn't name a product, a market or a size. It points in a direction, and it can keep unfolding for as long as the company exists. It also rules things out. A project that eases nobody's life, or that's shipped and never seen to matter, doesn't fit. That's a purpose doing work.

Purpose closes, vision explores

The most useful distinction we've found is between purpose and vision.

Purpose closes. It's the organisation's identity: the thing that stays fixed while everything inside it moves. People come and go, parts of the organisation grow and fade, work changes shape week by week, and the purpose holds still so that all that movement has something to move around. It's revisited rarely, and only by proposal.

Vision explores. A founder usually arrives with a vivid picture of what they want to build. On The Grove, that picture is treated as a set of speculations: bets about how to meet the purpose, each one to be tested against the world. Chapter 14 looks at bets in detail. The point here is that they're held lightly, and the purpose is held firmly.

An example we used again and again in design: imagine an organisation whose purpose is to support neurodivergent children. Its founder has a coaching programme in mind. That programme is only the first speculation about how to meet the purpose. Perhaps it works. Perhaps the families need something else entirely: a support network for parents, training for schools, a space for the children themselves. Many shapes could fit the purpose. If the founder had written the coaching programme into the purpose, every one of those discoveries would feel like failure. Kept apart, they feel like learning.

This also changes what success means. In an organisation on The Grove, success is how efficiently the organisation meets its purpose. Not how much vision it generates, and not how much work it does. A busy organisation full of exciting plans that serves its purpose poorly isn't succeeding. A quiet one that serves it well is.

What changes in an organisation on The Grove

Once purpose carries direction, it has to be built into how the organisation works, not just written down at the start.

Every part has one. The whole organisation has a root purpose. Each branch, each part within it, has its own guiding purpose, set in the forum around its parent. A branch can't be grown without one, and it's written as what the branch does for the purpose above it. So a steward holding a small part of a large organisation can ask the same question as the founder: does this belong here? The answer is nested, the way Chapter 5 described parts that are also wholes.

Changing the root is rare and shared. Only the root's forum can change the root purpose, and every member is asked for advice before it decides. It counts as the highest impact a change can have, so it needs two thirds of the forum's trust behind it and no concern standing. Then it waits out a timelock, three days before the change takes effect, so nobody can rewrite the organisation's identity in a hurry.

The organisation can see its own lean. We call this the purpose lens. The organisation's own reading, the traces its work and its conversations leave, shows each direction it's leaning and places that direction against the purpose: within it, at the edge, or drifting out.

It's information only. A persistent lean outside the purpose isn't treated as a fault. It may be the organisation sensing that its purpose is evolving. Frederic Laloux called this evolutionary purpose: the idea that an organisation has a sense of direction of its own, which its people can listen to rather than dictate.¹ Whether to steer back towards the purpose or revise it is the organisation's choice. The reading never recommends one. So far the lens has been tried only in test conversations, not yet by a real organisation over months.

Off-purpose work gets an answer, not a home. Sometimes work arrives that plainly sits beside the purpose: a request from a customer for something the organisation doesn't exist to do. It's still answered. Nobody is left hanging. But it's marked as beside the purpose, and it never grows new structure. No new part of the organisation forms around it. If three or more off-purpose requests arrive within four weeks, it raises a question for the root: is this a distraction, or is the purpose moving?

Purpose isn't the boundary. It's tempting to think the purpose draws the edge of the organisation. It doesn't. Purpose says what the organisation exists to serve. The boundary, as Chapter 5 set out, says what lies where: who takes part in which decisions, who holds which seats, who spends which money. Mixing the two leads to odd results, like treating a supplier who shares your purpose as a member, or a member who questions it as an outsider.

Value tied to purpose stays with it. Some assets and money in an organisation on The Grove are locked to its purpose. They can't be extracted from it, even if every member agrees. Today a purpose-locked asset can move between branches, still locked, but it can't be sold. We're building towards a way to sell one, with the proceeds staying locked to the purpose so they never return to free-circulating funds. This is one of the few rules in the system that can't be voted away. We call such rules invariants. It means that what was built to serve a purpose keeps serving it, whoever holds the seats in ten years' time.

How we decided

Four choices shaped this chapter.

The first was whether purpose should be a gate at founding. We could have let founders start without one and fill it in later, which is what most people do. Early tests settled it. In one, Wise-Eye let a destination through as a purpose. In another, it skipped purpose altogether and went straight to operational set-up: parts, seats, work. Both were treated as misses. An organisation without a working purpose has nothing to carry direction except the founder, and the founder becomes the boss by default. So nothing plants without one. Wise-Eye checks a wording once, and only if it needs it: when a method, a price or an audience is hiding in it, or it names a place to arrive rather than a direction.

The second was whether the system should correct drift. It would have been easy to build a purpose lens that warns, nudges or blocks work drifting outside the purpose. We chose information only, because a lean outside the purpose may be the purpose evolving, and only the people in the organisation can tell which. A system that corrected drift would also freeze the organisation's identity in its founding words.

The third was how easy purpose should be to change. Too easy, and it stops holding anything still. Too hard, and it becomes the wallpaper again: a sentence nobody can revise and so nobody believes. We chose a proposal decided at the root, with every member asked for advice and a timelock. We're not certain the balance is right. It may be too heavy for a three-person organisation and too light for a large one. Real use will tell.

The fourth came later, in October. For a while, purpose was also doing the work of the boundary. Thinking alongside Ted Rau's writing on organisations as social systems helped us see they're different things, and we separated them.²

What's still uncertain is the hardest part: whether people will actually read the purpose lens as information rather than judgement, and whether a purpose found in one conversation will still feel true a year later. Collins and Porras argued that lasting companies keep a core purpose fixed while changing almost everything else.³ Henry Mintzberg showed that most real strategy emerges from what an organisation does rather than what it planned.⁴ Our design tries to hold both. Whether it does is something only living organisations can show us.

What you might take from this

A purpose statement is wallpaper when something else carries direction. Take the boss away and the purpose has to decide, so it has to be found carefully, held firmly and changed only at the root, with everyone heard.

The founder's vision is something else: a set of bets, tested against the world and dropped without shame when they don't work.

Purpose decides; vision gets tested.

Notes and further reading

For a popular case that organisations start from purpose: Sinek, S. (2009), Start with Why, Portfolio. It's persuasive about why purpose matters to people, though it says less about how a purpose can carry decisions once nobody is in charge.

Chapter 9. The branch: cells, not jobs

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

• What bundling a person, a pile of work and a place in a hierarchy into a job costs
• What a branch holds, a purpose, accountabilities, domains and practices, and why no person is named
• How seats and crews bring people in, so several hats can be worn in the open
• The one rule that stops a single person deciding alone in a forum
• How new branches grow from the work, and how branches split, join and fade

Every few years a new way of organising arrives with its own vocabulary, and the sceptic has seen enough of them to know the pattern.

Departments become tribes. Managers become leads. Job descriptions become roles. A consultant draws circles instead of boxes, and for a while everyone talks differently. Then, quietly, the same people do the same work, answer to the same person and guard the same territory. The words changed. The organisation didn't.

So when we say that an organisation on The Grove is made of branches rather than jobs, a fair reply is: isn't a branch just a job title in a nicer coat?

It's a good question, and this chapter tries to answer it honestly. The short answer is that a job is shaped around a person, and a branch is shaped around a piece of work. That sounds like a small distinction. In practice it changes almost everything about who decides, who carries what, and how the organisation grows.

What the job costs

A job bundles three things together that don't belong together: a person, a pile of work and a place in a hierarchy.

Because they're bundled, they move as one. When the person leaves, the work leaves with them, and someone spends weeks discovering what they actually did. When the work changes, the job description doesn't, because rewriting it means renegotiating someone's position, pay and pride. When the hierarchy changes, people lose work they were good at and gain work they never asked for, because the chart moved and the work was stapled to it.

The bundle also forces a lie. Most people in most organisations do several kinds of work. The finance person also runs the office move. The developer also answers the hardest customer emails because they're the only one who understands the problem. None of that appears anywhere. The job title says one thing; the week says another. So the real shape of the organisation lives in people's heads, invisible to anyone trying to understand it, and lost when they go.

And jobs make empires possible. A job comes with a territory, and territory can be expanded. Hire two people under you, and your job grows. Hire ten, and you have a department. Nobody designed this as a way to accumulate power. It's simply what happens when the unit of organisation is a person with a patch.

The cost to the business is slowness and fragility: work that can't move without moving people, knowledge that walks out of the door. The cost to people is quieter. They're asked to be one thing on paper and several things in practice, and to defend a patch they may not even want.

A body with no one in charge

When we began designing The Grove's structure in early September 2026, the branch was the first thing we drew. Before forums, before proposals, before Wise-Eye, there was the question of what an organisation is made of.

The picture that unlocked it came from the sea. The Portuguese man o' war looks like a single jellyfish, but it isn't one. It's a siphonophore: a colony of many small, specialised units living as one body. Some keep it afloat. Some catch food. Some digest it. Some defend. Some reproduce. Each is shaped entirely by what it does, and none of them is in charge.¹ The body works because every part knows its function and the parts fit together, not because something at the top is directing traffic.

That gave us the starting point. The unit of an organisation isn't a person or a department. It's a function: something that needs doing, with the shape that doing it requires.

What a branch is

A branch, in an organisation on The Grove, is a part of the organisation shaped around a piece of work. It holds four things.

A purpose: the potential it exists to serve. When someone senses that something isn't right, or could be better, it's the purpose they're sensing it against.

Its accountabilities: the ongoing activities others in the organisation can expect of it. Not tasks to be ticked off, but the work it answers for, week after week.

Its domains: the things it controls. The website, a mailbox, a bank account, a supplier relationship. Think of them as keys. If a branch holds the key to the website, changes to the website go through that branch.

And its practices: how the work is done. These are agreed in the branch's own forum, and they bind everyone doing that work, including the AI. They're written in the plural, "we publish on Thursdays", so that a second person could step in and fit.

Notice what's missing. There's no person in that list. A branch says what needs doing and how, not who does it.

A branch is also a container. It can hold smaller branches inside it, each with its own purpose, accountabilities, domains and practices. Holacracy, the most worked-out boss-free system before ours, uses two separate units for this: circles, which contain things, and roles, which do things.² We merged them. A branch is both its function and a home for the smaller functions inside it. As Chapter 5 put it, each part is also a whole. That one choice makes the structure fractal: the same shape at every scale, from the root of the organisation down to a single small piece of work.

Because branches nest, every accountability has a path, like an address: root, then branch, then smaller branch, then the accountability itself. Two branches can share a name. Two can both be called "Outreach", say, in different corners of the organisation. They can never share a path. Nothing gets confused for something else.

Seats and people

If the branch doesn't name a person, where do people come in?

Each branch has a seat, held by a steward, as Chapter 7 described. Nobody takes a seat by their own proposal, unless they'd be deciding alone anyway. Someone else proposes them, and the forum around the branch's parent decides. We haven't yet built a step where the person named says yes. A seat can be shared, by two people co-stewarding or by a crew of the people doing the branch's work. When a shared seat takes part in a decision it carries one seat's voice, and each holder takes part as a person. Anyone can resign a seat, with a notice period they set themselves. If a seat empties, the branch above holds it meanwhile, so the work isn't orphaned.

Work is assigned to branches, never to people. And inside a branch, nothing hands out the pieces. Anyone in the crew can take a piece in hand, and the system shows who has it so it isn't dropped. Who takes what is the crew's business.

This is where the honest answer to the sceptic begins. Because a person can hold several seats, the finance person who also runs the office move can say so: they hold the finance branch and the premises branch. The structure finally shows what the week already knew. People wear more than one hat, and now they can do it in the open.

One rule instead of many

Forums are made of people, not branches. A branch is governed in one forum: the stewards of its parent and of its sibling branches, with the branch's own steward taking part as a person, and never the people of the branches below it. That's where its remit is decided. The root has no parent, so it's governed by its own stewards and the stewards of the branches grown directly from it, and that's where its remit and purpose are decided. Someone holding several seats can sit in many forums, and a crew carries one seat's weight. Autonomy over the means, accountability for the ends.

That raises an obvious problem. What if one person holds a branch and all the branches inside it? Their "forum" would be a room with one person in it, approving their own decisions.

For a while we had a cluster of separate rules to deal with this and related problems. One to stop empire-building. One to let a solo founder get started. One about when a small piece of work could become a container. One saying no branch is ever governed by a single person. On 22 September they collapsed into a single rule.

A forum with fewer than two distinct people doesn't decide. Its decisions route up to the nearest forum that does have two or more, and if none does, they end at the root. One person holding several branches is still one person in the room.

A great deal follows from that one sentence.

A solo founder builds freely, because there's nobody else yet, and everything routes to the root where they sit. The moment a second person takes a seat, decisions start being caught by a real plurality. Nobody can build an empire alone, because however many branches they hold, they can never be the only person in the room where those branches are decided. And a leaf held by one person, a branch with nothing inside it, becomes a container only with consent from the forum around its parent, because the forum around it, with nothing inside it yet, has only one person in it. A leaf whose seat is shared by two or more people can decide that for itself.

That last point matters. Only structural change routes up. The day-to-day work stays local, with the people doing it.

How structure grows

The root of the organisation is just another branch. It holds the purpose, and anything that hasn't found a home yet. At the start, that's everything. As branches form, accountabilities move out of the root to the branches that carry them.

New branches don't come from a design session. They grow from the work. Work that no branch holds rises to the branch above, and at the root it becomes a question for the forum: is a job missing here?

Wise-Eye watches for the pattern. When a kind of work arrives four or more times in four weeks, spread over at least two, with no accountability covering it, whether it comes from outside or from the organisation's own committed work, Wise-Eye offers the branch an accountability for it. A person raises that as a proposal, and the forum decides. And when a branch answers for two or more things and one of them is clearly defined, repeating work, it can be offered as a branch of its own.

The organisation's reading, the continuous view of its traces described in Chapter 5, shows where a branch wants to grow, wither, split or merge. From there one of a branch's jobs can grow into a branch of its own, or a job that reads as two can be split. A branch's jobs can join another branch where that work already lives, and a branch can be folded back into its parent. And a branch that fades is composted. We're building towards twinning, a sibling that tests a different approach with a hypothesis, a measure and a review date, and towards spinning a branch off into an organisation of its own. What it holds moves on to other branches; its name stays in the record.

One thing the reading never does is suggest merging two branches because the same people hold both. People wear the hat of the branch they're working in. Two hats on one head are still two hats.

We should be plain that most of this hasn't yet met real organisations in daily use. The rules have been walked through in test runs and simulated organisations. How the four-in-four-weeks threshold feels in a busy month, or how often jobs grow into branches, is something only real use will show.

How we decided

The name took a while. We considered "zooid", the biologist's word for each unit of a siphonophore, which was accurate and impossible to say in a meeting. "Cell" was close but sounded like a spreadsheet or a prison. "Bough" was lovely and slightly too poetic. We chose "branch" because it nests, a branch grows smaller branches, and because it fits the picture of a tree with a root.

Merging circle and role into one unit was the biggest structural choice. It cost us the familiarity of Holacracy's terms, and some people who know that system will miss the distinction. We judged that a single unit, the same at every level, was simpler to understand and harder to game.

Collapsing several rules into the routing rule was the most satisfying. Each separate rule had edge cases that the others had to patch. One rule, based on counting distinct people in the room, covered all of them.

We rejected two things that kept coming back. One was an "expandable" flag on roles, a setting that said whether a piece of work was allowed to grow smaller pieces inside it. The routing rule already gates that, through consent from the forum around the leaf's parent, so the flag was redundant. The other was a "Project" object with an owner and a plan. It looked harmless. It was the project manager smuggled back in: a person with a patch and authority over others' time. Work that needs doing belongs to a branch.

And we decided never to infer a merge from shared people. It would be easy to read overlap as duplication. It usually isn't.

What's still uncertain: whether people used to jobs will find it natural to say "I hold three branches" rather than "my job is". Whether shared seats will feel like real shared stewardship or slide into one person doing it and the others watching. Whether the routing rule, so clean on paper, will feel right when a two-person forum has to decide something one of them cares about far more. We think it will. We don't know yet.

What you might take from this

A job title shapes the work around a person. A branch shapes it around what needs doing, and lets people step in, share and step out without the work falling apart.

The sceptic is right that renaming jobs changes nothing. What changes things is organising the work first, so people can wear more than one hat honestly.

Notes and further reading

On the holon, a part that is also a whole: Koestler, A. (1967), The Ghost in the Machine, Hutchinson. On nested circles governed by consent, which Holacracy built on: Endenburg, G. (1998), Sociocracy: The Organization of Decision-Making, Eburon. On the different ways organisations group their work, by function, by market and more: Mintzberg, H. (1979), The Structuring of Organizations, Prentice-Hall.

Chapter 10. Belonging without a seat

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 a member without a seat can't propose or consent, and why that line is drawn on purpose
• How joining works as a welcome and a vouch, and why leaving needs nobody's permission
• What a member without a seat can do: sense, advise, move work, see the whole
• Why consent goes with seats, and where that lets the boss grow back
• Where this sits beside sociocracy and co-operatives, and what's still open

Anyone who has spent time in a sociocratic circle or a worker co-operative will have a question ready by now, and it's a sharp one.

Earlier chapters said that only people who hold a seat raise proposals, and only people who hold a seat decide. So what about everyone else? A member who belongs to the organisation but holds no seat can't propose a change, can't consent to one and can't object to one. That sounds like two classes of people: those who decide, and those who are decided about. Call the first group stewards and the second members, and it's still a hierarchy. It just has nicer words.

It deserves a straight answer, and part of that answer is that the sceptic is partly right. There is a real line here, drawn on purpose, and it has a cost. This chapter says where the line sits, why we drew it there, what pushes against it, and where it still hurts.

What the usual answers cost

Most organisations already have two classes and don't pretend otherwise. Partners and staff. Founders with shares, and everyone else with a contract. The people below the line can be consulted and surveyed. They can't change anything. The business pays for this slowly: what people see from where they stand rarely reaches anyone who can act on it. The people pay for it by learning that belonging is conditional, that you're in only as far as your usefulness reaches.

The movements that set out to fix this went in two directions.

Co-operatives gave every member an equal vote: one member, one vote, whatever capital they put in.¹ That's a genuine floor of equality, and it matters. But in a co-operative of any size, the vote mostly lives at the general meeting. Members elect a board, the board appoints managers, and the week's decisions are made much as they are anywhere else. The equality is real, and it's periodic.

Sociocracy went the other way. Its unit is the circle, and everyone in a circle consents to the circle's decisions.² Nobody outside the room makes the call for you. But to have a say you need to be in a circle, and circles tend to grow, because being in the room is the only way to be heard. A circle of twelve deciding by consent is slow, and the people who can't make the meeting lose their voice anyway.

So the usual choice is between a vote that's equal but distant, and a voice that's close but costs everyone their evenings.

Two things that were tied together

The turn, for us, was noticing that two different things had been bundled: belonging and deciding.

Belonging is about who's in: are you part of this, and can you see what's happening and speak into it? Deciding is about who carries a particular part of the work, and lives with it if a change goes wrong.

In an organisation on The Grove these are kept apart on purpose. Belonging is a floor. It comes by welcome, not by merit, and it doesn't shrink if you're tired, or quiet, or only here for a season. Deciding follows carrying. You decide about the parts of the organisation whose work you hold.

Joining and leaving

Joining is a welcome, not a vote. Someone who holds a seat writes a personal invitation with a note, and sends the link themselves. Whoever opens it sees who invited them and into what, reads the organisation's agreement about how we're here together, and joins by agreeing to it, or doesn't. There's no ballot and no fee.

The invitation is also a vouch, so it carries a little weight, and it's paced: after an organisation's first thirty days, someone invites only once they've been here two weeks, and no more than two people a week. In a newcomer's first month, a seat holder other than the one who invited them can question the invitation. One question alone does nothing. If a second seat holder joins it, the newcomer's membership is put on hold, and whoever vouched for them can't invite anyone for a season. It's a guard against people being brought in by the dozen to swing things. It's also, plainly, a power seat holders have over new members that members don't have over them.

Behind the vouch sits a principle about identity: what an organisation needs to know about you grows with the say you carry, never with the money you bring. Belonging is light. Signing in proves you're the same person each time, but not who you are. To share in the floor, the design asks that you're shown to be one real person, not one of several accounts. And to hold a seat, which means deciding for others, it asks that you're fully known, by a proper identity check of the kind a bank does, usually called KYC, for "know your customer". That rule is written into the core. No organisation runs a check yet, because we haven't chosen who will do the checking, so today the vouch is what stands behind a seat holder: someone already seated invited them, and is accountable for it. Until full checks run, a seat is held on that vouch and on what people see each other do.

Leaving needs nobody's permission: no proposal, no notice period, no trust. It takes effect at once. You come off any seat you held, and the work in your hands goes back to its branch. What you did stays in the record; you take no share of what the organisation holds; and you can be invited back. The only person who can't leave is the last member, because that wouldn't be leaving. It would be closing the organisation, which is a different act.

What a member without a seat can do

A member can raise what they sense. Anyone who belongs can call a sensing in the Field: a question put to a part of the organisation, open for a window of days. Members offer into it in their own words and mark what lands with them, blind, with no names and no counts until it closes. In the Field every member's voice weighs the same, and that view, one member and one voice, is the first one the reveal shows. Whoever called a sensing can also invite people from outside by a personal link, a customer or a neighbour, whose words are shown beside the members' and never mixed in. When it closes, the person who called it draws together what was born of it: a direction for the organisation, or work sent to the branch it's for.

The Field owes most to Otto Scharmer. In his Theory U, a group that wants to see something new has to sense together before it decides anything: to look at the situation from many places at once, and to listen past what it already thinks, before a single view hardens. He calls it co-sensing, and the Field is built for that moment. It gathers before it judges, keeps names out so nobody performs, and decides nothing.

A member can give advice. Every proposal is visible to everyone who belongs, and while one is gathering advice, any member can give theirs or say something on it. A change to the purpose, or to how we're here together, goes further: every member is asked for advice by default, seat or none. The forum still decides, but it decides having asked everyone.

A member can move work to where it belongs. Ushering work to the branch it's for isn't governance, so anyone who can see it can usher it.

A member can see the whole. The organisation's flame, and the readings beneath it of how things are going, are open to every member, each reading opening onto what feeds it. Nothing about how the organisation is doing is kept for the people at the root.

A member can say they'd like a seat. When a branch posts an open seat, every member sees it and can say, in their own words, that they'd like it.

Barbara Marx Hubbard had a name for the pull behind that: vocational arousal, the inner urge to give your own particular gifts to something larger than yourself. She trusted it as a guide to where a person belongs in the whole, and so do we. Someone asking for a seat is telling you where they'd give.

And a member takes part in the rest of the life of the place: appreciating what someone did, coming to the Clearing, the gathering that's kept off the record.

What they can't

A member without a seat can't raise a proposal. If they try, they're told so and pointed to the Field. They can't check a proposal's shape, consent to it, or raise a concern that holds it. They don't hold or give trust in a forum, because each forum's trust is shared among the people who hold its seats, as Chapter 12 describes. They can't take a branch's work in hand or answer its post; that belongs to whoever holds its seat, and the way in is to join its crew. And they can't invite someone new.

There's one narrow exception on concerns. Any member can say they depend on something the organisation holds. If a proposal would move something that's locked because people depend on it, those people can hold that proposal with a concern, seat or not.

Why consent follows the seat

The reason is accountability. The people who carry a part of the work decide about it, because they're the ones who live inside the decision on Monday morning. A decision made by people who won't carry it is the old problem in a new place: authority without responsibility. Chapter 7 described the opposite failure, responsibility without authority. The seat is how we try to keep the two together.

It also keeps the organisation honest about who's carrying what. We moved work firmly onto seats after simulated organisations showed people without seats quietly doing the work while the structure stopped growing, because nobody needed a seat to get things done. So the work belongs to the seat, and if you're doing a branch's work, the invitation is to join its crew and say so. A crew isn't a promotion. It's the people doing a branch's work, sharing its one seat.

The routing rule from Chapter 9 does the rest. A forum with fewer than two distinct people in it doesn't decide; its decisions go to the next forum up that has two or more, and end at the root if none has. A forum is made of the people who hold seats in it. Members without a seat don't change that count.

Where the boss grows back

That last sentence is where the cost lives, and it's better said plainly.

A founder with five members, none of whom holds a seat, decides alone. Every decision routes to the root, and she's the only person there. The organisation even says so, once, where deciding lives: nobody else holds a seat yet, so what she decides is decided, and every decision is kept. Her members can sense, advise, usher and watch. They can't stop her. Structurally, that's a boss with good manners.

Nothing in the rules forces her to share. The boss can grow back by default, simply because seats weren't offered. What pushes against it is the design around the rules. Branches post their own open seats, and every member sees them. The root can be shared from the first day: a group founding together names the others before planting, and they join the root's crew as they arrive. Work goes to branches rather than to people, so there's a place someone else could step into. On the foundations, the founder doesn't get to skip anyone: a change to the purpose or the agreement waits for each member's advice, or for its advice period to run out, before it's decided. And once anyone else is here at all, the agreement changes only by proposal, in the open.

None of that is a guarantee. A founder who wants to stay the boss can. What the design does is make the shape visible: anyone can see that one person decides everything, and a branch one person holds is shown beside its siblings with nothing to explain it away. Members also keep the oldest power there is. Albert Hirschman called it exit: when voice isn't enough, people leave, and their leaving tells the organisation something it needed to hear.³ Here exit costs no permission, and it's there every day.

Beside sociocracy and co-operatives

It's fairest to say where we're close to each, and where we part.

With sociocracy the closeness is real. Consent rather than majority. Decisions made by the people who do the work. Seats offered, and agreed in the forum around the branch's parent. Where a crew shares a seat, everyone in it takes part, much as everyone in a circle does. The difference is that sociocracy assumes belonging means being in a circle. We let people belong without being in any forum at all, and give them voice through the Field and through advice instead of a seat at every table. We think that keeps forums small and decisions moving. The cost is that a member outside every forum has no consent anywhere.

With co-operatives the difference is larger. Co-operative members can vote out the people who run things. An organisation on The Grove has no general meeting and no member vote on who holds which seat. The equal voice lives in the Field, where it informs and decides nothing. Some co-operative readers will find that a step too far, and we understand why. Our reasoning is that a periodic vote over people is a blunt tool for a living organisation, and that what it guards against, people holding power they shouldn't, is better met by seats anyone can step out of, trust that lasts only while peers keep giving it, and decisions that come back for review. We hold that view with some humility.

How we decided

We weighed three ways to draw the line. Every member consents to everything: equal, and unworkable past a handful of people. Every member votes on the big things: closer to a co-operative, but it brings back majority and leaves a losing side. Or consent sits with the people who carry the work, and voice is wide for everyone else. We chose the third.

The details moved more than once. In November we decided that changes to the purpose and the agreement ask every member for advice, so nobody's foundations change without their being asked. At the same time we settled that a member without a seat doesn't propose a new version of the agreement directly: they're asked for advice on every change to it, and the Field is theirs. And we drew a careful line in the words. When the organisation says someone is alone, it counts the people here, seat or none. When it works out who decides, it counts seats.

What's still open: whether advice and sensing feel like real voice to members, or like a suggestion box with better manners. Whether open seats will be offered as readily as the design hopes, or whether founders will hold on. Whether members should have some way to question a seat holder, as a co-operative member can vote one out; for now they don't, and their routes are the Field, advice and leaving. Bringing people from outside into a lone founder's Field more widely than a personal link is written down for later. And the rule that hands on the root when its last holder leaves, to the holders of the branches just beneath it or else to whoever has been here longest, is still provisional. We think the line is in the right place. Members, not we, will tell us whether it is.

What you might take from this

Belonging and deciding are different things. Most organisations either tie them together or give one away to protect the other. Here, belonging is a floor anyone welcomed stands on, and deciding sits with the people who carry the work.

The sceptic is right that there's a line. The answer isn't to pretend otherwise, but to keep it easy to cross and impossible to hide.

Everyone who belongs can sense, advise and see the whole; the people who carry a part of the work decide about it; and the way into carrying is open to anyone who wants it.

Notes and further reading

On consent in nested circles, where sociocracy began: Endenburg, G. (1998), Sociocracy: The Organization of Decision-Making, Eburon. On organisations where anyone may decide after seeking advice: Laloux, F. (2014), Reinventing Organizations, Nelson Parker. On co-sensing, a group perceiving together before it decides: Scharmer, C. O. (2016), Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges, second edition, Berrett-Koehler. On vocational arousal, each person's pull towards their own part in the whole: Hubbard, B. M. (1998), Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential, New World Library. On sensing together, where Scharmer's co-sensing first took shape: 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. On a group thinking together before anyone decides: Bohm, D. (1996), On Dialogue, Routledge; and Isaacs, W. (1999), Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together, Currency.

Chapter 11. Making decisions

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

• What the boss's call, majority voting and consensus each cost
• How consent and the advice process combine, with clocks in place of meetings
• How a proposal moves through shape, advice, the vote, a timelock and its review
• Why there's no expert veto or override, and what happens when a forum is stuck
• What people can and can't do when the building's on fire

Say the word consent to someone who has spent a few years in a collaborative workplace and watch their face.

They're picturing a circle of chairs. A proposal that took three weeks to write. A round where everyone speaks, then another round, then a break, then someone who missed the last meeting asks to start again. A decision that finally lands in the fourth session, worn down until nobody objects because nobody much cares any more. Or, just as often, no decision at all: the item rolls over to next month's agenda, and the month after, until the problem fades or the person who raised it leaves.

The sceptic's conclusion is a fair one. Either consent means endless meetings, or it means nothing gets decided. Probably both. Far better, surely, to let someone with authority make the call and get on with the work.

What the usual ways cost

The boss making the call has real strengths. It's quick. Someone is clearly accountable. Nobody has to sit in a circle.

But a decision made at the top is made far from where the information lives. The person who notices that the onboarding process loses a third of new clients is rarely the person who can change it. They can mention it, write it up, hope it reaches the right desk. Most people try that two or three times. After that they stop, and the organisation loses what they could see. Changes arrive by announcement, so the people who live with them had no hand in them. And once a decision is made, nobody has much reason to check whether it worked, because finding out it didn't would cost the person who made it.

The alternatives most groups reach for carry their own costs. Majority voting is fast, but it leaves a losing side who go along without owning the result. Consensus, where everyone has to agree, gives any single person a way to hold everyone else in place, often over a preference rather than a real problem. It rewards the loudest and the most patient. The tired go quiet. The people who care most about the work get worn down by the process of changing it.

For the business, all of these end in the same place: decisions that are slow, or wrong, or never checked. For the people, they end in a quiet lesson that noticing things isn't worth the trouble.

A different question

In the 1970s, a Dutch engineer named Gerard Endenburg was running his family's electrical engineering company and looking for a way to govern it without the usual fights between owners and workers. Drawing on the work of the educator Kees Boeke, he settled on a small change of question that turned out to matter a great deal.¹ Instead of asking does everyone agree?, the group asks does anyone have a reasoned objection?

That's consent. It isn't everyone saying yes. It's nobody being able to name a harm. A proposal doesn't have to be anyone's favourite. It has to be good enough to try and safe enough that the group can learn from it. Teachers of sociocracy have spent decades refining how that works in practice.²

A second strand came from a different direction. Frederic Laloux, studying organisations that had done away with bosses, described what he called the advice process: anyone can make a decision, as long as they first seek advice from the people it affects and the people who know the area well.³ Advice isn't permission. It's there to be listened to, not obeyed.

Put those together and something shifts. Anyone can raise a tension, and anyone with a seat where a change is decided can propose it. Advice is open and wide. Consent is narrow and reasoned. And there's a third ingredient that neither strand needed to name, because both grew up in rooms full of people: time. Meetings exist largely because coordination used to need everyone present at once. If a clock can do that job instead, the circle of chairs becomes optional.

How a change happens

In an organisation on The Grove, every change to the structure is a proposal: a new part of the organisation, a changed purpose, a seat filled or handed on. Stepping down from a seat needs no proposal. It's a right. And every proposal starts from a tension, a sensed gap between how things are and how they could be.

Anyone holding a seat in the forum that will hear the change can raise one. So can whoever holds the branch a piece of work sits on, raising it from that work. Anyone at all, seat or not, can surface a tension through a sensing in the Field or through feedback, and someone with a seat can take it up.

Say you hold a seat, and you've noticed that client questions keep landing in the wrong part of your organisation and bouncing back. You draft a proposal. It carries the tension in your words. It carries the change itself, written so precisely that the system can enact exactly what it says. It says what you expect to happen, in plain words and as up to four of the organisation's own measures, so the review has something real to look at later. It carries what the idea stands on: the work or evidence behind it. And it sets its own periods for advice and review.

While you draft, Wise-Eye can read it and offer what's missing: who would answer for the work, a measure, what would show it worked, what it would cost, a first step. If you shape it together in conversation, it asks lightly who this touches and whether they've been heard. You can take its offers, or not. It's a prompt, never a gate.

Then the proposal moves through its stages, each one on a clock.

Shape. Another person in the forum that will decide it, never you, checks that it's clear and that it does what its words say. Not whether it's a good idea. Just whether it's honest about itself. (A forum is the group of people who govern a part of the organisation: for a branch, the stewards of its parent and its siblings, with its own steward taking part, as Chapter 9 described.) If they think it isn't clear, they send it back and say what it needs. You can rework it, or stand by it, in which case the next forum up checks it instead. If nobody looks at it for three days, it rises to the next forum up. If nobody agrees its shape in time, it lapses. A founder working alone has nobody else to check, so their proposals pass this stage at once.

Advice. The proposal is put to two kinds of people: those with skill in what it touches, and those it directly changes. A change to the purpose, or to the agreement about how we're here together, is put to every member. This lasts between three and fourteen days, or until everyone asked has answered. Advice never holds a proposal up. The one exception is someone who depends on a locked asset the proposal would move; their word does carry weight.

The vote. The people who decide either consent or raise a concern. It passes when those consenting carry enough of the forum's trust and no concern stands. How much is enough depends on how far the change reaches: a fifth, two fifths or two thirds. The vote stays open for two days so everyone deciding can see it, unless they've all consented sooner. A concern holds the proposal until it's met, either by reworking the proposal or by the person lifting it. A concern has to say what must be answered before you could consent. We ask that it names a harm, not a preference: "I'd prefer it another way" isn't a concern. For now the system checks only that something is written. Nobody's trust is ever counted for them. But silence isn't a concern: once the two days are up, a change can pass without everyone's word. And if a concern is still standing when time runs out, ten days from its latest version, the proposal lapses: things stay as they are, the concern stays on the record, and the tension behind it is still shown.

Made. High-impact changes wait out a timelock first, three days, with a circuit breaker: a concern raised in that time stops it. So there's a pause before anything that can't easily be undone. When one proposal carries several changes, they're made together or not at all.

Reviewed. When its day comes, four weeks later by default and open for a week, everyone who took part is asked: did it land, what did we learn, should we keep it, change it or stop it? Evidence from the organisation's own records sits alongside, including the measures the proposal named at the start. If the review recommends a change, that becomes work for the forum. The system never raises a proposal of its own.

Any rework at any stage resets the proposal: it's checked again and advice is asked again. A rework that only answers the advice it was given goes back, for a day, to those who gave it. What people consent to is what they were advised on. There's no room for a bait and switch.

Who decides

The people who decide are the governors of the forum that holds the change, which is the forum around the branch's parent: the stewards of the parent and of the branch's siblings, with the branch's own steward taking part as a person. Whoever holds the changed branch's seat decides alongside the others, as a person, not from outside. If that forum has fewer than two people in it, the decision moves up until one has. A founder alone, or a founder whose members hold no seat, decides alone. Their voices are weighted by the trust their peers have placed in them for that kind of matter, which Chapter 12 explores. The organisation-wide pool of skill advises; the local forum decides.

Wise-Eye takes part all the way through, but never decides. It gives the checker a note on whether the change matches its words. It offers its own advice, clearly marked as its own. If you ask, it will rework your proposal to fit the advice you received. And at review, it summarises what happened alongside the evidence.

There is no expert veto, and no safety override. That's deliberate, and it's the part people push back on hardest. The reasoning is developmental: an organisation that lets a call be made, go wrong and correct itself learns more than one that's protected from ever trying. The backstops are the ones already described: the consent of the people directly affected, the review that comes round whatever happens, and trust, which peers can move towards whoever keeps turning out to be right.

When it's stuck

For the rare case where a forum is evenly split, the design includes a jury drawn by lot. It's a last resort, used only when reshaping has been tried, time has run out, and leaving things as they are would itself do harm. The jury doesn't rule on whether the proposal is good. It rules only on whether an objection is legitimate. Apathy never goes to a jury: if people simply haven't engaged, the proposal lapses. The jury isn't built yet.

Tensions that don't go away

A lapsed proposal doesn't make its tension disappear. Organisations on The Grove show tensions of two kinds side by side. Some the work reveals by itself: work bouncing between branches, work done from the wrong place, work nobody holds, overlaps such as the same outside person turning up in two branches' work. Others are raised: the tension behind a proposal that lapsed, was withdrawn, or whose review said it didn't work.

Since 1 November 2026, an unresolved tension rises to the next forum up after fourteen days, and on up a forum at a time. If it reaches the root, it says so plainly: the whole organisation hasn't answered this yet.

None of this needs a meeting. It runs asynchronously, on a clock, in the places people already work. People can still meet if they want to. Nothing waits for them to.

Much of this hasn't been tried with real people yet, and the lengths of the clocks are our best first guesses.

And when the building's on fire?

Anyone who has run anything asks it within minutes. The roof is leaking onto the stock. A client's details have gone somewhere they shouldn't. A key supplier folded overnight. Who grabs the wheel?

In an organisation on The Grove, nobody grabs the wheel of the organisation itself. There is no administrator, no override, no emergency path around the stages above. But most of what a fire needs was never a change to the structure. It's work, and work moves without a proposal.

Here is what someone can do today. Whoever holds a branch can act on its work at once: take it, answer it, ring whoever needs ringing. Work that comes in marked as unable to wait goes to the top of what its holder sees and into their day. Anything at high stakes is held for a person, with a careful draft from Wise-Eye, which never sends it alone. Money never moves through the system at all. It stays in the organisation's own bank, so someone who has to pay a plumber at midnight simply pays, and records it after. With a receipt, and under any limit the organisation has set for one person's word, it counts on their word, open to question by any member for a week. The books never refuse a payment for lack of funds; whatever the budget can't cover shows as owed. And when work is at risk of missing its day, whoever holds the branch above can step in and take it, even out of someone's hands, or approve an answer that was waiting on one person who isn't there.

What they can't do is just as plain. Nobody can change the structure in a hurry. A change passes only as fast as everyone involved answers: a check, advice that closes once everyone asked has replied, a vote that closes once every decider has consented. A high-impact change then still waits out its three-day timelock. The circuit breaker on that timelock is a brake, never an accelerator: a concern can stop a change in those three days, but nothing can hurry one through. Nobody can be taken out of a seat without a proposal. And nothing is pushed. No page, no alert, no phone ringing at three in the morning. If the fire starts while everyone's asleep, it waits in the place they'll look first when they wake.

That's a real cost, and we don't pretend otherwise. In September we sketched a break-glass mode: one named person given command over one area's work for a few hours, easy for others to cancel, unable to touch the purpose, the money or anyone's right to leave, and owing a full account afterwards. We haven't built it. Part of it, sending the commander's work to people's phones, sits against a later decision that nothing goes out to a member. Whether to build the rest is open.

Why live without it for now? Because an override built for emergencies tends to become the way things are really decided. Whoever holds the key gets used to turning it, and everyone else learns to wait for them. What we kept instead is a bet: that most fires are work rather than structure, and that the people nearest the work are best placed to act. Once the smoke clears, any change to the structure goes the ordinary way, and its review asks whether it helped. An emergency that keeps coming back is usually a missing branch, and the answer is to grow one.

How we decided

We weighed majority voting, consensus and consent, and kept weighted consent. Majority voting leaves losers. Consensus hands everyone a veto over preferences. Consent asks for reasons.

We split advice from deciding. Advice is open and routed to whoever has the skill, wherever they sit. Deciding is local and belongs to the forum that holds the change. We put it to ourselves as: the global field advises; the local field decides.

We dropped an older rule that kept a branch's own people out of decisions about their own branch. It had been meant to stop people protecting their patch. In the end we removed it for the same reason we refused an expert veto: people learn by deciding about the things they live with, and by living with the results.

We narrowed who can block, twice. First to the people directly affected, and then further, to the deciders at the vote and to people who depend on a locked asset. Everyone else advises, and advice is heard.

The jury started life as a more general tool. In October we saw how casually it had crept into the design, and narrowed it to the last resort described above. The idea of unresolved tensions rising through the organisation came from outside voices in November, people who pointed out that a lapsed proposal could quietly bury a real problem.

What's still uncertain: whether peers really will move their trust towards good judgement fast enough to stand in for an expert veto, and whether a standing concern will feel like accountability or like obstruction to the people around it. We think the review and the rising tensions will keep things honest. We'll know when people use it.

What you might take from this

Consent doesn't have to mean meetings, and it doesn't have to mean paralysis. Put a clock on each stage, keep advice wide and blocking narrow, and require that every objection names a harm, and decisions start to move.

Anyone can raise what needs changing, and nothing changes without surviving scrutiny.

Notes and further reading

For a different route to the same idea, Holacracy's integrative decision-making, which tests objections against whether they would cause harm: Robertson, B. J. (2015), Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World, Henry Holt. On synergy and co-creation: Hubbard, B. M. (1998), Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential, New World Library.

Chapter 12. Trust

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 every organisation already has a hidden trust system, and what it costs
• What PageRank, EigenTrust and Ostrom suggest about trust gathered from peers, and what to avoid
• How trust works as governance weight, given by peers in each forum on each kind of matter
• Why there are no chains, no global score and no way to buy a say
• How reputation guides advice but never decisions, and how trust meets conflict and bad faith

Here's a doubt worth taking seriously.

Trust is human. It grows slowly between people who have worked together, kept their word, shown up when it mattered. It lives in glances and in history. You can't write it into software. And the moment you try, you get something worse than no trust at all: a number. A rating. A league table of colleagues. Something people learn to game, or fear, or both.

The sceptic is right about a lot of that. Trust between two people can't be manufactured. And the history of putting numbers on people is not a happy one.

But every organisation already has a trust system. It just isn't written down. This chapter is about what happens when it is, and about all the things we chose not to write.

The trust system you already have

In most organisations, the question of whose voice counts is settled by position. The person with the bigger title carries more weight in the room. That's the official answer.

The real answer is messier. Some people carry far more weight than their title suggests, because others have learned to listen to them. Some carry far less, because they're quiet, or new, or don't fit the shape of the people who usually get heard. Some carry weight on everything, when they've only earned it on one thing. The finance director's view on the new product gets more airtime than the product designer's view on the budget, and nobody quite decides that it should.

This unwritten system costs a great deal. The business pays when the loudest voice wins rather than the most informed one, when a decision about care is swayed by someone who knows money, or when good advice from a junior colleague is quietly ignored. People pay too. The ones who are heard carry more than they should and come to believe their own standing. The ones who aren't heard stop offering what they see. Over time, the organisation loses the very knowledge it most needs.

The writer Jo Freeman named the deeper problem in the early 1970s, looking at groups that had thrown out formal leadership.¹ Removing the structure didn't remove the power. It just made it invisible, and invisible power is the hardest kind to question. It tends to gather around the charismatic, the well connected, the people who were there first. An organisation without a boss that ignores this ends up with bosses anyway, just unnamed ones.

So the choice isn't between a trust system and none. It's between one nobody can see and one everybody can.

What peers already know

There's a long line of thinking that loosens the sceptic's doubt from an unexpected direction.

In the late 1990s, the founders of Google faced a problem that looks nothing like an organisation: how to tell which pages on the web are worth reading.² Their answer was to let the web vote. A page linked to by many pages carries weight, and a link from a page that itself carries weight counts for more. Nobody sits in the middle deciding what matters. The judgement comes from the network itself.

A few years later, researchers at Stanford applied the same idea to peer to peer file sharing, where strangers swap files and some of them are trying to cheat.³ Their system, EigenTrust, let each peer's experience of others add up to a picture of who could be relied on. Again, no central judge. Trust was something peers conferred on each other, based on what they had seen.

And long before either, the economist Elinor Ostrom spent decades studying communities that manage shared resources, fisheries, forests, irrigation systems, without either a ruler or a market running them.⁴ What she found again and again was that the people closest to the resource were the best placed to watch over it, that those who used it should help set its rules, and that sanctions worked best when they were graduated and came from peers.

None of this proves trust can be built into a system. But it does show that what peers know about each other is real information, and that it can be gathered without anyone at the top deciding who counts. The question becomes how to gather it without turning it into a weapon.

That's where these older systems also teach us what to avoid. PageRank produces one global score, and global scores attract people who want to capture them. Liquid democracy, the idea that you can delegate your vote to someone you trust, who can delegate it again, creates chains that can pile enormous weight onto one person.⁵ Both are clever. Both concentrate.

Trust as governance weight

In an organisation on The Grove, trust has a narrow, specific meaning. It's governance weight: how much say someone carries in decisions in a particular forum, on a particular kind of matter. A forum is where decisions are made, as Chapter 9 described: a branch is governed in the forum of its parent's and its siblings' stewards, where its own steward takes part as a person. A kind of matter is a category: finance, say, or care.

So nobody has trust in general. They have trust in this forum, on this kind of thing.

Each forum has its own trust economy for each category. Everyone holding a seat in that forum has an equal share to give away. They share it out to the peers they trust on that kind of matter. Until they choose, it's spread evenly. If you think your colleague Ana has the clearest head about money in your forum, you might give her a large share of your finance grant, and spread the rest. On care, you might give it somewhere else entirely.

A few rules shape how it moves.

You can't give trust to yourself.

Trust given to someone can't be passed on again. Ana can't take the trust you gave her and hand it to a friend. There are no chains.

Nobody can save their share up and spend it all at once on a decision they care about. Whatever you haven't directed goes evenly to your peers.

Each person's choice stands until they change it, and they can change it any day. So standing lasts only while peers keep giving it. We designed trust to decay as well, so nobody's standing outlives the reasons for it. In the system as it runs today it doesn't decay yet: weight moves only when peers move it.

If everyone spreads their share evenly, everyone ends up with the same weight: one voice each. Quorum is a share of the economy's total, so a decision needs enough of the forum's trust behind it, not just enough heads in the room. And reading someone's trust when a decision is taken doesn't spend it. Taking part costs nothing.

Small standings, many of them

Nothing crosses from one economy to another. Someone who sits in ten forums has ten small, separate standings, never one big one. There's no single figure that follows a person around the organisation, and no global reputation for anyone to seize.

That's deliberate. Competence is contextual. Someone can be wise about care and clumsy about money, trusted in one branch and new in another. A single score would flatten all of that into one judgement about a whole person, which is exactly what the sceptic fears.

Seats work the same way. A shared seat carries one seat's weight, split between the people holding it. When a seat changes hands, the trust peers gave to that seat goes with it to the new holder, until those peers choose otherwise.

Three ways of being seen

Trust conferred by peers is one way of seeing someone's contribution. It's not the only one, and on its own it has the weakness Freeman warned about: people tend to trust whoever is most visible.

So we've designed an organisation on The Grove to look through three channels. There's the trust peers have conferred. There's measured contribution, what the work itself shows someone doing. And there's vouched presence, colleagues confirming that someone shows up and takes part.

The useful part is the gap between them. When someone's work is substantial and steady but little trust has come their way, that's a quieter person worth noticing. When someone carries a lot of trust but the work shows little behind it, that may be charisma doing the work. Neither is a verdict. Each is a prompt to look again. We haven't built this view yet. When we do, it has to keep a rule we made later: no reading ever scores a person.

Advice and decision

Alongside trust there's something broader: reputation. It's an organisation-wide picture of skill in each category, built from peers' commendations, reviews of how proposals actually landed, and standing.

Reputation decides who is asked for advice. It never enters the decision itself. The global field advises; the local field decides. If someone across the organisation is known for sound judgement about care, they're among those asked for advice before a forum decides something about care. But the weight in that decision belongs to the forum's own economy.

Reputation is never published. Each person sees only their own mirror. There's no leaderboard, no badge, no ranking. The organisation's readings, the patterns it notices in the work, never carry a person at all. People are never scored.

Trust and money

Trust can't be bought, sold or transferred for value. Money may fund work. It can never buy voice. The two are firewalled, so someone who puts money into an organisation gains no say from it.

The same thinking runs through identity checks. We're building towards checks that step up with governance responsibility, not with wealth. The more say someone carries, the more the organisation needs to know they're real. The design asks a full identity check, the kind a bank calls KYC, of anyone who holds a seat, and only a lighter check that someone is one real person for anyone sharing the floor. The rule is in the core, but no organisation runs a check yet: we haven't chosen who will do the checking. Chapter 10 says what stands in its place for now.

When trust breaks down

Trust also shapes how an organisation on The Grove handles conflict.

We treat blame pooling in corners as an early sign of decline. The response comes in two steps. First, release: a chance to let out what's been building, in a space called the Clearing. The Clearing is off the record. Nothing said there feeds any reading. Then, turning blame into authorship: not "who's at fault?" but "what would you like to see happen?" That applies to everyone, and especially to the people with the most standing.

One person's blame may be projection. Many people independently arriving at the same concern is a real signal, and worth heeding.

And when someone really is acting in bad faith, there's no tribunal. Trust fades as peers withdraw it. A forum can hand their seat to someone else by proposal. We're building towards a way to exclude someone as the last step; it isn't there yet. The organisation stays whole and the person goes. Nobody needed the power to fire them. Their peers simply stopped lending them weight.

How we decided

The idea of a trust system is older than The Grove. An earlier experiment in 2023 played with it. Once branches and forums stood in September 2026, trust became the keystone that held them together. We built it in the first wave of the core on 19 September and refined it on 22 September.

The biggest choice was rejecting one global trust score. It would have been simpler, and it's what most reputation systems do. We chose separate economies for each forum and each category instead, because a single score is a single target for capture, and because nobody is equally trustworthy on everything.

We rejected weighting by seniority or tenure. Being there longest is not the same as being trusted most.

We designed trust to decay, so that power never settles permanently. That isn't running in the system yet. Either way, a decider who keeps ignoring good advice loses weight as peers notice and withdraw.

We firewalled reputation from decisions, and money from both.

And we chose not to build an expert veto. It was tempting: let the person with the strongest track record stop a bad decision. But a veto is a hard edge of power, and the same work happens more slowly and more safely as peers move their trust towards whoever keeps being right.

What we don't yet know is a lot. None of this has been tested with real people at scale. The right rate of decay is a genuine open question: too fast and trust becomes a popularity contest each cycle, too slow and it hardens into the old hierarchy. That's a question for simulation and for the first pilots.

What you might take from this

The sceptic is right that trust can't be manufactured. But it can be made visible, kept local, and made to keep moving. Your organisation already has a trust system. The only question is whether anyone can see it, question it and change it.

Trust is earned from peers, it fades if it isn't renewed, and it can never be bought.

Notes and further reading

On trust and cooperation more broadly: Axelrod, R. (1984), The Evolution of Cooperation, Basic Books. On autonomy, mastery and purpose as what moves people, rather than carrots and sticks: Pink, D. H. (2009), Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Riverhead Books.

Chapter 13. Work that finds its way

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

• What handing out work costs the manager, the business and the people given it
• Why work belongs to a branch, and nobody can give work to anyone else
• How everything comes in through one door and is routed in a fixed order, with guesses marked
• How connectors and the organisation's own website, the Canopy, carry work in and replies out
• Why work weighs more or less depending on where it came from
• How playbooks and new structure grow from the work, and what's left out on purpose

Here's a doubt that sounds like plain common sense.

Someone has to hand out the work. An email arrives from a client. A supplier sends an invoice. A customer complains on the website. Somebody has to read it, decide whose it is, and pass it on. Take away the person who does that and the work piles up in a shared inbox until someone gives in and deals with it, usually the most conscientious person in the room, who then quietly becomes the boss anyway.

It's a fair point. Work doesn't sort itself. If nobody is giving it out, something else has to be doing that job, and it had better be good at it.

This chapter is about what that something is.

What handing out costs

In most organisations, handing out work is the manager's job, and it's a bigger job than it looks. It means reading everything that comes in. It means knowing who's busy and who isn't, who's good at what, who's on holiday next week. It means chasing what was handed out to see whether it got done.

A whole industry of tools has grown up to support this. Task trackers, priority fields, sprints and backlogs, capacity plans, timesheets, status reports that travel upward each Friday. They're often well made. But look at what most of them are for. They exist so that one person can hand out other people's time and then check on it.

That has a cost for the business. The manager becomes the place where work queues. When they're away, things stall. When they misjudge who should do something, it gets done badly or twice. And because work belongs to whoever it was given to, it leaves with them when they leave.

It has a cost for people too. Work that's handed to you is work you didn't choose. You can do it well, but it's hard to care about it the way you care about something you stepped towards. And the person handing it out carries a load nobody can carry for long: holding everyone's week in their head.

The work already knows where it goes

As Chapter 4 described, in 1959 the French biologist Pierre-Paul Grassé noticed that no termite directs the building of a mound.¹ Each one responds to what the last one left behind. He called it stigmergy: coordination through traces in the work itself, rather than through instructions from someone.

We're not building mounds. But the idea points at something useful. Most work, when it arrives, already carries clues about where it belongs. An invoice says it's about money. A booking says it's about the calendar. A complaint names a product. If an organisation has written down, clearly, what each of its parts answers for, then much of the sorting a manager does in their head can be done by matching the work against those answers.

In 1999 Stephan Haeckel argued that organisations in an unpredictable world need to stop planning and start sensing and responding, with each part clear about what it's accountable for and free to answer in its own way.² That's close to the shift here. The question stops being who should I give this to? and becomes which part of us answers for this?

Work belongs to a branch

In an organisation on The Grove, work belongs to a branch, never to a person. Nobody can give work to anyone else. People take it. The only exceptions are the system's own: work arriving on a branch with one holder lands with them, and a promise made in a reply lands with whoever sent it, if they hold that branch.

That's the whole of it, and it changes a great deal. As Chapter 7 described, people hold seats in branches because they chose to. When work arrives at a branch, whoever holds it can pick it up. Taking a step on a piece of work is a way of saying I can.

One door

Work reaches an organisation in many ways: email and other connected services, the website, chat between branches, the Field, decisions, things set to happen on a schedule. All of them come in through the same door, and all are routed the same way. We test for this. If anyone adds a new way in that slips past the door, a test fails.

Behind the door, the routing follows a fixed order. First, it looks for an accountability that names the work, on any branch, anywhere in the organisation. An accountability is one of the things a branch has said it answers for, like bookings or supplier invoices. If one fits, the work goes there.

If nothing names it, the router looks for a branch the work plainly belongs to anyway. It waits there as work with no job yet, and its presence tells the branch it may need a new accountability.

If no branch is a plain fit, Wise-Eye makes its best guess, and marks it as a guess. The branch's people can confirm it or move it on, and each move teaches Wise-Eye where that kind of work belongs. Nothing goes out to anyone while the work is still a guess, and Wise-Eye never guesses at high stakes.

And if nothing anywhere comes close, the work goes straight to the root as work no job covers. It becomes a question for the forum: who are we, if this keeps arriving?

Ways in and out

The door has a front side. Before work can be routed it has to reach the organisation, and a reply has to find its way back out. That happens in two ways.

The first is the connector: a link to one outside service, saying exactly what the organisation may do there and nothing more. Four are built. A Gmail mailbox, which can read, label and send, and can never delete anything for good. A Google Drive, which reaches only the files and folders someone picked in Google's own chooser, and only to read them. The organisation's social accounts, through one service that gathers many platforms, so comments and messages come in and answers and posts go out. And its books in Xero, read only, so the money can be seen without anyone typing it in. There's no calendar among them, because organisations on The Grove keep no calendar of people.

A connector belongs to a branch. Whoever holds that branch's seat connects it, and says whose account it is: the branch's own, or their personal one carrying the branch's work. A personal one is flagged. It pauses when they leave the seat, and only they can hand it to the branch. As Chapter 9 described, a mailbox is one of a branch's domains. Any branch whose work it is can answer and write through it, under its own name, unless a proposal has locked that domain to its holders. Reading all of it, setting its rules and removing it stay with whoever holds the domain. Connecting, pausing and removing each go on the trail.

The keys never come inside. Signing in happens on a thin relay outside, which seals the key so that only that one connection can open it. The system stores the sealed form and never the key. The relay can open it only while a job for that connection is in hand, and forgets it within minutes. Remove a connector and its key is gone for good.

A mailbox is looked at every minute or so, and its first sort happens where the mail is: the branch's own rules first, then rules it accepted from Wise-Eye, then Wise-Eye's reading of the sender, the subject and the opening lines. Only work is brought in whole. What's unclear comes in as headers only, with a question, is this ours?, which is let go after a fortnight unanswered. Everything else stays in the mailbox, and all that's kept of it is a bare reference, for a week. A new rule that brings mail in looks back thirty days for what it would have caught. Comments and messages from the social accounts have no first sort: they all come in, and triage files what's noise.

The second way is the Canopy, the organisation's website. It isn't a connector. The system serves it itself, at the organisation's own address and at up to five domains of its own. Its structure, each section's words and its look are held as separate domains, and nothing reaches the open web until the people holding a part publish it. Wise-Eye can draft every word and publish none. The page runs no outside script and sets no cookie, and visits are kept as daily totals: views, never people. A message through its form, or anything another website posts to an address the organisation has opened for it, becomes work. And what it chooses to publish as a feed, any website can read.

Whichever way it arrives, work then comes through the one door like everything else.

When the stakes are high

Some work can't wait and can't be got wrong. An angry client. A letter from a tax authority. That kind of work is still routed, but it's held for whoever holds the branch's seat, with a careful reply drafted beside it. Only a person sends it.

What people can do with work

Once work has landed, the people holding a branch can route it within the branch, refuse it, in which case it rises to the branch above, or say it isn't work for the organisation at all. Any member can usher it to another branch.

Work doesn't sit forever. Work from outside that nobody has taken after two weeks can be taken by the people on the branch above. Work that still has no job after two weeks moves up a branch. If it reaches the root and still no job covers it, it rests there as homeless. That isn't a failure of anyone. It's a sign that an accountability may be missing.

Where it came from matters

Not all work weighs the same, and how much it weighs depends on where it came from, not on anyone's opinion of it.

Some work comes from outside: somewhere along its chain, it reaches something that arrived from a client, a supplier, the world. Some is held: the organisation's own committed work, like a regular cadence, a measure it watches, or a decision it made. Some is going out: a post or a probe with nothing inbound behind it. And some is made here, with nothing felt behind it at all.

Only work from outside and held work make a branch want to grow. Work from outside counts only if it cost the sender at least a real ask: a like or a passing comment shows attention, not need. And demand for something beside the organisation's purpose never grows anything on its own. Made-here work with no job waits folded until someone gives it a job or lets it go.

We chose this after seeing something uncomfortable. In a brand new organisation, almost all the work is imagined. Nobody outside has asked for anything yet. Without weights, the person with the most ideas would generate the most work, and the structure would grow around them. The loudest visionary would build the organisation. Weighting by where work came from lets the world, and the organisation's own promises, shape it instead.

Work is shown in order of how much it matters that someone picks it up. It's never given a score. Why it sits where it does is one tap away.

Four springs, and playbooks

Work rises from four springs. There's committed work: what a branch has said it answers for, some of it set to happen every so often, at set times, on a date, when a number crosses a line, or when a record changes. There's floating work, named in the moment. There's homeless work. And there's work born from decisions, including a proposal's own date for review.

How an accountability's work gets done can be written down as a playbook. When work is routed to that accountability, the playbook starts. Anything it would send waits for a person's approval. After five low-stakes drafts in a row go out exactly as written, Wise-Eye offers to send that kind itself, and a person says yes or no. Anything with more at stake always waits for a person. When people correct what it did, those corrections become suggestions, and the steward accepts or dismisses each one.

Structure grows from the work

When the same kind of work keeps being carried by hand, the branch is offered help: records to keep it in, a board, a practice, an invitation for someone to join the crew. When weighted work keeps arriving with no accountability to name it, one is offered. The organisation's shape follows what it actually does.

Each branch has a board of next moves, seen only by whoever holds it. The cards point to the work; they never copy it.

And where branches overlap, for instance when the same outside person turns up in two branches' work, or promises to one person are split across branches, that shows as a structural tension for people to look at. We decided this on 1 November, and it hasn't been tried with real organisations yet.

What isn't here, on purpose

There's no assigning people. No capacity planning, no smoothing out anyone's load, no timesheets, no priority fields, no sprints or backlogs, no status reports travelling upward, no alerts. When nobody hands out other people's time, that whole layer has no job to do.

What remains is small. The promise, which Chapter 15 explores. The route. The automation. And three things left for a person: to decide, to promise, and to do something on a particular day.

How we decided

The routing order came first: an accountability that names the work, then a branch it plainly belongs to, then the best fit, then learning from where people usher it. That order was settled in October 2026.

The harder question was what to do with work that has no exact home. One option was to refuse it, and send it back to the root every time until someone wrote an accountability for it. That would be clean and honest, and nearly unbearable for a small organisation whose accountabilities are still thin. We chose best guess plus learning instead, with the guess clearly marked and nothing sent while it's a guess. We're not certain the guessing will hold up across many organisations. It's been tested in simulation, not yet with real people.

Simulation has already taught us something. In one simulated world, a small practice of facilitators, every booking landed in the root's inbox first and was then passed on to the new bookings branch, thirty-one times over. The reading took all that sorting as work bouncing between two branches, and six days after the bookings branch was made, suggested merging them back together. The fix was simple once we saw it: the door's first sorting never counts as a pass. But it was a good reminder that the reading only sees what it's told to see.

Choosing to weight work by where it came from followed from watching new organisations fill up with imagined work.

And on 29 October we decided, firmly, not to become a work management tool. There are no reminders sent out into people's other apps and no calendar of people. David Allen's Getting Things Done helps a person keep their own list.³ Kanban, as David Anderson set it out, helps a team see and limit the work in flight.⁴ Both are good at what they do, and people may well keep using them. Organisations on The Grove aim at something different: the route by which work reaches the part of the organisation that answers for it. Whether people will miss the familiar layer of tasks and priorities, or feel lighter without it, is something we'll only learn when real organisations use it.

What you might take from this

Handing out work feels necessary because, in most organisations, nobody has written down clearly enough which part answers for what. Once that's written, most of the sorting can follow from it, with people confirming and correcting rather than allocating.

Nobody needs to hand out the work: it can find the part of the organisation that answers for it.

Notes and further reading

Chapter 14. Vision as hypothesis

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 governance built on imagined tensions lets the loudest visionary win
• How a founder's vision enters as bets, each one saying what would show it wrong
• How many small, aimed probes test a bet, and why silence isn't counted against it
• What counts as evidence, how a verdict is reached, and how invented work waits for the world
• Why claims about ourselves and claims about the world sit in separate lanes

Every organisation starts with someone who can see something that isn't there yet.

They can describe it in detail. Who it's for, what it will feel like, why the world needs it. They've often carried it for years. Without that picture nothing would begin, and the people who join early usually join because the picture moved them.

So the sceptic's view deserves a fair hearing. The founder's vision is the point. It's why the organisation exists. Asking a founder to treat it as one opinion among many sounds like asking a composer to put each bar of a symphony to a vote. Some things are made by one person seeing clearly, and committees make them worse.

We agree with more of that than you might expect. The vision matters. The question this chapter asks is what happens to it once there's an organisation around it.

What it costs to build on a picture

A new organisation has no operating life yet. Nothing has arrived from outside, nobody has asked for anything, nothing has been tried and failed. So every tension in it, every sense of what's missing or what needs a home, is imagined.

That has a quiet consequence. In Chapter 11 we described how an organisation on The Grove changes its own shape by consent, in response to tensions people actually feel. In a new organisation, the tensions are mostly pictures of the future. Governance built on imagined tensions is design by vision with consent attached. The process looks fair, but whoever imagines most vividly, and speaks most confidently, ends up holding the structure. The loudest visionary wins, and everyone else agrees to a map of a place none of them has visited.

The business cost is familiar to anyone who has started something. Months spent building what nobody wanted. A team shaped around a market that turned out to be somewhere else. Work invented in planning sessions that keeps people busy and changes nothing for anyone outside.

The people cost is less talked about. Early team members learn that the way to have influence is to have a bigger picture than the next person. The quieter ones, who often notice first that something isn't landing, learn to keep it to themselves. And the founder carries something heavy: if the vision is the point, then when it meets the world and wobbles, the founder wobbles with it.

The world as the one who answers

The turn came from a few directions at once.

In the early 2000s, Steve Blank began telling entrepreneurs something blunt: there are no facts inside the building.¹ Everything a founder believes about customers is a guess until a customer says otherwise. Eric Ries later built on this, describing a start-up as an experiment in what people actually want.² Before both of them, the philosopher Karl Popper had argued that a claim worth calling scientific is one that could, in principle, be shown wrong.³ A belief that survives every possible outcome tells you nothing.

And from a different field, Stephan Haeckel described organisations that sense and respond rather than make and sell: ones that read signals from outside and shape themselves around what they hear.⁴ Frederic Laloux, writing about organisations without bosses, described purpose as something listened for rather than imposed.⁵

Otto Scharmer, coming at it from the inner side of leadership, gave us the word we use for the next step: prototyping. In his Theory U, once a group has sensed what wants to emerge, it doesn't write a plan. It explores the future by doing: small, quick, rough experiments that let the world answer early, while there's still time to change course.⁶

Put together, these suggest a different relationship between a founder and their vision. Not an order to follow, and not a dream to protect. A set of beliefs about the world that the world can answer.

One more picture shaped our thinking, from computer graphics. Path tracing, a way of rendering realistic light, works by firing huge numbers of cheap rays into a scene. Most of them return almost nothing useful. But as their count grows, the picture sharpens out of the noise. No single ray matters much. Enough of them, aimed sensibly, and the image arrives. That turned out to be a good model for how an organisation finds out whether what it believes is true.

The organisation, in short, is sensing, not inventing.

Bets and probes

In an organisation on The Grove, a founder's vision enters as bets. Founder statements carry no special weight. Whoever holds a branch can make bets on it, the founder included, and the founder will often make the first and most important ones. A branch holds at most three open bets at a time, so beliefs compete for a few places instead of piling up. But each one has to stand on what comes back.

A bet says seven things. What it believes. What would show that the belief holds. What would show that it doesn't, and this part is required: a belief that can't be shown wrong isn't admitted. Who the bet is about. The smallest way to ask them. A day to look back by, no more than six months away. And its measure: how many answers have to come back by that day, and at least what each must cost the person giving it. The measure is set before anything goes out, and it doesn't change afterwards.

Each bet lives on a branch, one of the parts of the organisation that Chapter 9 introduced, and the people holding that branch look after it. Wise-Eye can prepare a bet from a conversation, so it's ready for someone to confirm with a tap. It never makes one itself.

Then comes the probe. A probe is a piece of outbound work that tests a bet and expects a reply by a certain day. A short post in a group where the right people already talk. A message offering one small thing. A question asked in a place where the answer might come.

The design expects many probes, each expecting almost nothing. A success rate close to zero is normal. The more probes go out, the sooner the ones that work show up.

There's something of Barbara Marx Hubbard in this way of looking. She argued that the way forward is found less by cataloguing everything that's broken than by searching out what's already working and connecting it. A probe that rises is a small piece of what's working. The design is built to notice those, not to tally the silences.

But many isn't the same as scattered. Each probe is aimed: who it's for, where it goes, in what words, and from what reading of where people already gather and the language they already use. We often describe it with a fly fisher's eye. Read the water. Match the hatch, meaning offer what's already on the surface rather than what you wish was there. Choose the fly. Cast where they are. Watch the drift.

What comes back

Three things can come back from a probe.

A take: someone responds. A refusal: someone says, in effect, "not for me". That's right water, wrong fly, and it's useful. Or no rise at all.

Silence is treated as background, not as evidence against the bet. Most probes meet silence, and reading that as rejection would kill good bets early. Only after many probes with nothing back does the reading suggest looking again at the aim: perhaps the water, perhaps the fly.

When something does come back, it becomes evidence, and the rules about what counts are deliberately strict. Only work from outside the organisation can be linked as evidence. The people holding the branch can also count by hand what came back, like who turned up to a trial, but that counts only as our own word. Each piece of evidence is linked to the bet, and the link says which way it points and what it cost the person who gave it: a glance, a few words, a question they asked themselves, some of their time, a commitment. Nothing is weighted. A bet can ask that its evidence come only from the people it's about. A "not for me" is kept and shown beside the yeses, but only yeses count towards the measure. Anyone holding a seat can contest a link, and a contested link doesn't count until it's settled.

None of this produces a score. The weighing is shown in words, so people can see what lies behind a bet and argue with it.

The verdict, and the work that waits

There are three verdicts: the bet held, it needs reshaping, or it didn't hold. When the bet's day comes, it's read against its own measure, whether or not anyone is looking, and marked held or didn't hold. The people holding the branch then confirm that, or say otherwise with a reason, and the reason shows. Reshaping is always theirs to decide. Wise-Eye never gives a verdict. And a bet nobody ever asked anyone about gets no verdict at all: it stays untested. A bet can't be said to hold with nothing in its favour, and answers from inside the organisation never count, however many people agree. The verdict says what it rests on: strangers, people who know us, or only our own word.

A reshaped bet creates a successor. It starts fresh, but takes the work waiting on the old bet and any probes still out. The old bet keeps its evidence, so the trail can be read back. Over time these chains become a trail: from a founder's first speculation to the place where the organisation's purpose can actually be met. Bets with nothing new back for six weeks fade to untested, so a stale belief doesn't sit on the map looking proven.

This changes what happens to invented work. Picture a planning session where someone proposes a series of workshops. In most organisations that becomes a project, with dates and owners, before anyone has asked whether people want workshops. In an organisation on The Grove, the work isn't rejected. It's made to wait for the world. "Make it a bet" drafts a bet and a first probe, and the task is parked on the bet. If the bet holds, the work wakes, grounded in the evidence. If it didn't hold, the work is let go, with the evidence there to show why.

Something similar applies to growing the organisation's shape. A new branch needs something felt behind it. That can be work arriving from outside, or the organisation's own work that people have committed to and are holding. It can be a bet that held, or the work's own reading that a branch wants to grow, as Chapter 5 described. In the first thirty days, before there's much to read, it can be what was already happening before the organisation came onto The Grove, on the word of whoever raises it, shown to everyone deciding.

Two lanes

Not every belief is about the world outside.

Claims about ourselves, that we're stretched, that care is going unkept, that a meeting has stopped being useful, are sensed by us. They're sensed in the Field, the organisation's own way of listening to how its people find things, and nobody needs a customer's permission to say they're tired.

Claims about the world need the world. Twenty voices agreeing that people want workshops is still a guess. A strong feeling inside the organisation is real information about the organisation. It isn't information about anyone else.

Not a marketing machine

Anything that sends messages outward and counts replies can become a marketing machine, so the guard rails matter as much as the mechanism.

The measure is purpose met, efficiently. Never reach, clicks or conversion. Frames are honest: something being explored is described as being explored, not dressed up as finished. We want asks to go only to people who chose to hear. Today that's a principle, not a rule the system enforces: a probe by email goes to twenty people at most, each message says how to say no thanks, and writing to people who never said yes is left to the sender to weigh. The reading looks at patterns, never at individuals. And someone who answers a probe is a person to serve or to learn from, never a lead.

How we decided

The original rule was stricter. Only crossings of the outer boundary, things that came from or went to the world outside, would give anything weight. We loosened it in one place: the organisation's own committed work, held by people who've taken it on, counts as weight too. And we gave internal sensing its own lane, rather than forcing feelings about ourselves to pass an outside test they were never meant for.

We chose states in words over scores everywhere. A number invites gaming and hides its reasons; words can be read and disputed.

We started with bets first and a graph of claims to follow, a web linking every belief to every other. Then we dropped the graph. We decided relations between bets should come from nearness, from how close in meaning they are, and we're building towards that. Today two links are kept: the trail of reshapes, and a bet that is one piece of a bigger one. It was simpler, and simpler seemed more honest about how little we knew.

The whole model is itself a bet. It should shrink invented work without starving valuable work, the slow, uncertain things that matter before anyone outside can say so. It hasn't yet been tried with real organisations, and we don't know where it will be too strict or too loose.

And there's a known gap, which we've recorded rather than hidden. A determined visionary alone in a new organisation can still get through in places: through their own committed work, and through their word in the first thirty days. We haven't closed that, and we're not sure it can be closed without making it impossible to start anything at all.

What you might take from this

The founder's vision still matters. It's where the bets come from, and often the best ones. What changes is where its authority comes from: not from the founder's certainty, but from what comes back when the organisation asks.

A vision is strongest once the world has answered it.

Notes and further reading

On path tracing, the rendering method that shaped our picture of probes: Kajiya, J. T. (1986), "The Rendering Equation", Proceedings of SIGGRAPH '86. On searching out what's working rather than cataloguing what's broken: Hubbard, B. M. (1998), Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential, New World Library. On setting out a venture as a set of assumptions to test: Osterwalder, A. and Pigneur, Y. (2010), Business Model Generation, Wiley.

Chapter 15. Promises

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 organisations without a boss are suspected of being soft on deadlines
• What a simulated bakery showed when promises had nowhere to live
• Why commitments get a firmer mode, firm on the promise and never on the person
• How a promise is carried, timed and raised when it's at risk, and who may step in
• What was left out on purpose, like alerts and timesheets, and why

Here's a doubt that usually arrives once people have warmed to everything else.

Self-management sounds lovely for deciding things. Purpose, proposals, who holds which seat: fine, talk it through, take your time, consent when you're ready. But a customer who was promised a delivery on Thursday doesn't care how gracefully you reached agreement. They care whether it arrives on Thursday. And the sceptic suspects, with some reason, that organisations without a boss are soft on exactly this. Nobody chases. Nobody is on the hook. Deadlines become gentle suggestions, and the people who keep their word end up quietly carrying the ones who don't.

It's a fair worry. Plenty of flat organisations have discovered it the hard way. Taking away the person who shouts about deadlines doesn't automatically put anything in their place.

What a missed promise costs

The cost of a dropped commitment is easy to see from the outside. A customer waits, chases, waits again, and goes elsewhere. A partner stops trusting your dates and starts padding their own. Revenue leaks out in ways that never show up as a single line on a report, because each lost order looks like a small, separate accident.

The cost on the inside is quieter and lasts longer. When nobody can see who is carrying a promise, the conscientious people carry all of them, just in case. They lie awake over things that may already be in hand. Meanwhile someone else is swamped and nobody knows, because being swamped doesn't show on any screen. Then the date passes, and the hunt for whose fault it was begins. That hunt is the part people remember. It teaches everyone to promise less and hedge more.

The usual fix is a manager with a list. It works, up to a point. It also puts one person at the centre of every commitment, and that person becomes the thing everyone waits on, the familiar bottleneck.

The bakery that lost its orders

Promises came late in the design of The Grove. By the time we turned to them, on 20 October 2026, we had already built how organisations decide, how trust is extended, and how work finds the branch that answers for it (a branch being the part of the organisation that holds a particular kind of work). We thought commitments would follow naturally from all that. A simulation showed us they didn't.

We ran a model-played bakery organisation over many weeks: AI agents playing the people, customers sending orders, the whole thing running on the system as it then stood. In one run, a promise made to a customer landed on a branch with nobody carrying it. Its day came and went with nothing said. Two weeks later, several well-meaning helpers found it at the same moment, and every one of them wrote the same apology.

That wasn't a one-off. In that run, twenty-seven of sixty-seven orders were lost without an answer. Replies that had been drafted sat for days waiting on one approver, and nobody could see that this person was swamped. Helpers collided eleven times, each stepping in on work someone else had already picked up.

Nobody in that bakery was lazy or careless. The structure simply had no place for a promise to live. Everything invitational about the design, the openness, the absence of anyone handing out tasks, was doing its job. It was just the wrong mode for this kind of work.

Two modes, one organisation

That was the turn for us. Being self-managing doesn't mean treating all work the same way. It means picking the right mode for each kind.

Purpose, sensing, proposals and structure stay invitational in an organisation on The Grove. They're about what we might do and how we might be, and they're better for being open. A commitment made to someone is different. Someone outside is relying on it. So it gets firmness: an owner, a date, a clock everyone can see, and a way of rising when it's at risk.

The firmness applies to the commitment, never to the people. Nobody is ordered to do anything. Nobody's standing goes down because a promise they carry is in trouble. What changes when a commitment is at risk is that more people can see it, and more people may step in.

Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores argued in the 1980s that much of the real work of organisations happens in conversations for action: someone asks, someone promises, someone declares it done, someone accepts.¹ The promise is the hinge. Our job was to give it somewhere to sit.

What changes in an organisation on The Grove

Every promise belongs to a branch and is carried by a person. The branch answers for it, so if the person moves on, the promise doesn't vanish with them. But a branch can't feel pressure, and a person can. So each promise is carried by someone, by default whoever made it. Anyone holding the branch can take the carrying over. If Wise-Eye, the AI companion, made a promise on its own, nobody carries it until someone takes it up. Once the branch knows how far ahead that kind of work usually starts, a promise nobody carries reads as at risk a day sooner, to leave time to find someone.

The rhythm is learned, not guessed. Many planning tools ask you to estimate up front how long each step takes. Organisations on The Grove don't. Once a branch has kept three or more promises of a kind, the system learns how far ahead the steps usually start and how long they take. Until then, it assumes nothing, unless the branch says for itself how far ahead a step starts. What the branch says comes first. An early version assumed every step started the day before the promise was due. That's a bakery's rhythm, not a law of nature, and we took it out.

Each step has a latest start. Worked back from the promise's day, every step has a point by which it needs to begin. A step reads as starts by a date, then start today or tomorrow, then at risk once its latest start has passed and nobody has it, or stuck if it's in someone's hands but untouched for longer than that kind of step usually takes, plus a day. And every card says what's at stake in plain words: if this doesn't start by Wednesday, the order promised to a named customer for Friday is missed. Not a red light. A sentence.

Risk rises as a message, not a push. When a step goes at risk or stuck, a message goes from its branch into the conversation of the branch above, once. If it goes overdue, it travels one branch further. Anyone holding a branch above may take a step that's at risk, stuck or overdue, even from a seat someone else fills. It says so on the work, where whoever had it will see it. This is what escalation means here: visibility plus permission, not authority. Nobody above gains the right to order anyone. They gain the right to help.

Asks from outside run on a clock. When someone outside the organisation asks for something by a day, the ask needs answering early enough for the work to be done. And if an answer is waiting for approval and goes at risk, someone holding the branch above may approve it. Whoever approves makes the promise. That's the cure for the swamped approver in the bakery.

Load is visible. For each person, anyone can see what waits on them: promises carried, work in hand, answers waiting on their approval alone. It's said as what waits, never as a judgement. There are no scores and no comparisons. If one person's load is keeping work waiting, and someone else has been doing that branch's work lately, Wise-Eye may offer to propose them to share the seat. An offer, never a move.

There's a check before promising. Before a promise goes out, it's compared with what's usual for its kind: its size, how much notice it gives, how loaded that day already is, whether the customer is new. Within the usual, Wise-Eye may send it as a low-stakes reply, once it has earned the right to send that kind. The first three promises of any kind always go to a person, because there's no usual yet. Outside the usual, a person approves, with the reasons shown. Agreeing a standing arrangement, the every-week kind, always needs a person. Once agreed, each next time comes round by itself.

There's one state, not two. When a promise is settled, its record card moves with it. Nobody updates a tracker and then updates a board.

Changes stay human. If a promise moves later, earlier, is cancelled, or the organisation asks to move it, that happens on the same promise, on its own thread, and a person approves it. Wise-Eye never changes or calls off a promise by itself.

It's worth naming what organisations on The Grove deliberately don't do. They don't assign people. They don't plan capacity, keep timesheets, set priorities from above or run sprints. Nothing sends alerts or reminders out to your phone or inbox. Taking a step is a way of saying I can. If you're away, you mark yourself away, and any promises you carry that fall in that time read as needing someone to carry them. Nobody has to notice you're gone for the work to notice.

How we decided

The first question was who owns a promise. A manager, a rota and the branch as a whole were all possible. We chose whoever made it, because they're the one who feels its weight. Ownership passes only when someone else accepts it, never by decree. That keeps the invitational spirit intact even inside the firm mode.

The second was whether others could take overdue work out of someone's hands. This one took longer, because it can feel like a small violation. We said yes. Otherwise a promise could be locked to a person who's off sick, and the customer pays for the organisation's politeness. The work says who took it and from whom, so nothing happens behind their back.

The third was push notifications. They would have caught more slips. They'd also have turned the system into one more thing buzzing at people at dinner. We declined. Nothing is pushed outside; the work shows its state where the work lives. David Allen's point about getting commitments out of your head and into a trusted place shaped this, though we put the trusted place in the shared organisation rather than in one person's list.²

We also chose to build promises as one complete piece rather than in slices. The bakery had shown how the parts depend on each other: visible load without rising messages helps nobody, and rising messages without permission to step in just spread the worry. Eliyahu Goldratt's work on protecting the whole chain rather than padding each step was in the back of our minds too.³

What's uncertain is the obvious thing. This has been tested in simulation, not with real organisations. We don't yet know how it feels to have a step taken from you, however kindly. We don't know whether people will trust learned rhythms or want to override them. And we don't know whether a message into a branch conversation is loud enough, when the stakes are high and the room is busy. Those answers will come from the first organisations that use it.

What you might take from this

Self-management doesn't have to be soft on deadlines. It can keep its openness for the things that benefit from openness, and give real firmness to the one thing that has someone outside depending on it: a commitment.

The firmness sits on the promise, not the person, and when a promise is in trouble the answer is more eyes and more hands, not more pressure.

Freedom and keeping your word aren't opposites; in a good organisation, each makes the other possible.

Notes and further reading

On promises as acts that change the world rather than describe it: Austin, J. L. (1962), How to Do Things with Words, Oxford University Press.

Chapter 16. The front desk

A working draft, November 2026. This book is being written while The Grove is being built; expect it to change. Written from the build as it stood on 5 November 2026, before it reached the shared code; to be checked against the code once it does.

In this chapter

• Why an AI answering customers sounds like a script that fobs people off or promises what nobody agreed
• What the usual front door costs: phone trees, chatbots that can't do anything, and customers starting over on every channel
• How one front desk answers on every channel, and does only three things: answer, take it in, or finish it
• How it knows who it's talking to, keeps one history per person, and sees only what it's allowed to
• Why it's a different voice from Wise-Eye, how it holds its boundaries kindly, and what isn't built yet

An AI answering customers is a call-centre script with better grammar. It'll either fob people off or promise things nobody agreed to.

That's the doubt, and both halves have happened. Most of us have typed into a chat window that could only point at the help pages, or pressed through a phone menu that never offered the option we needed. And in 2024 a tribunal in Canada held an airline to a refund policy its own chatbot had made up: the airline argued the bot was responsible for its own words, and the tribunal disagreed.¹ An organisation's front door is where the people it serves meet it. Get it wrong one way and they feel unheard. Get it wrong the other way and the organisation is bound by something nobody inside decided.

What the usual front door costs

In a small organisation, the front door is whoever picks up. That's usually the person who also does the work, so the phone rings in the middle of it, or doesn't get answered at all. Messages arrive on half a dozen channels, and each lives in its own inbox. A customer who emailed last week, messages today and calls tomorrow has to explain themselves three times, to three people who can't see each other's notes.

Larger organisations buy their way out with menus and machines, and most of us know how that goes. Press one for this, two for that. Listen carefully, as our options have changed. Four menus deep, the option you need isn't there, so you press the one that's nearest and end up in the wrong queue. Or the machine asks you to say what you're calling about, and you say it, clearly, three times, and it hears something else. "Sorry, I didn't catch that." You find yourself shouting "agent" at a recording, or pressing zero over and over in the hope it leads to a human. There are websites whose whole purpose is to tell people which buttons to press to reach a person at a given company. When you do get through, you're asked for the account number you've already typed in, and you start again.

None of it is an accident. Those menus and scripts protect the organisation's time, often at the customer's expense, and they rarely know the work. The bot can tell you the opening hours. It can't tell you whether your order will be ready on Saturday, because it can't see the order.

The cost falls in two places. Customers feel processed rather than helped. And the people doing the work carry the switchboard on top of it, which is exactly the kind of load Chapter 7 argued crowds out the part of the work only a person can do.

One desk, many ways in

An organisation on The Grove has a front desk: the organisation answering at its own boundary. It's one conversation, with many ways in, and the same rules for all of them.

Today it answers in chat on the organisation's own website, the Canopy from Chapter 13, and on WhatsApp, text message and direct messages on the social platforms, all through the organisation's own messaging account. Adding a way in never adds rules: who's calling, what may be seen, what may be promised and how it all threads together belong to the desk, not to the channel.

We're building towards voice: speaking with the desk on the website, calling the organisation's phone number, or calling on WhatsApp, all on one path. And later, video, which we think of as a call with a screen, not a face. The screen shows what's being said, and for a known customer their own orders and where they stand. We chose no face on purpose. A face would turn a collective into one person, which is the opposite of what an organisation on The Grove is.

And there's no menu. Nobody presses one for this and two for that. The caller says what they want in their own words, and the desk works out what they mean, the same way the one door reads work for what it asks rather than which words it uses. When voice comes, it's meant to listen the same way, in ordinary speech, with a person always one request away and never a recording to shout at.

Three things, and only three

The desk does three things.

It answers, from what the organisation has made public, and, for a customer it has verified, from their own dealings with the organisation: what was said, where each thing stands, what was promised and for when.

It takes it in. What the caller wants becomes work through the one door from Chapter 13, with the conversation attached, and lands on the branch that answers for it.

It finishes it, while the caller is still there, when the branch has allowed that and the promise is like ones it has kept before.

What it never does: decide anything, propose anything, change the organisation's shape, see inside work it isn't scoped to, or promise outside the usual.

Who's calling

The desk always knows which of three kinds of caller it has. Anyone, who can hear what's published. Claimed, someone who has said who they are, which opens nothing more, because saying so proves nothing. And verified, someone who has proved it, who can also hear about their own dealings with the organisation.

On a channel where the platform itself says who sent a message, a WhatsApp number or a social handle the organisation already knows counts as verified for that conversation. Anywhere else, the desk sends a one-time code to a contact the caller has already proved, and they read it back. That also proves the new contact. When voice arrives, it will never verify anyone by the number they're calling from, because caller numbers can be faked.

The caller's identity comes from the system, never from the model. A model saying "this is Jo Smith" changes nothing.

One person, one history

Picture a customer who messages on WhatsApp on Monday to order something for Saturday. On Wednesday they open the chat on the website to change the order. On Thursday they message on WhatsApp again: any news? To them that's one matter. On The Grove it is too.

The organisation keeps two small things about people outside it. A caller: the contacts they've proved, the name they gave, and their cases. And their cases: every piece of work they were a party to, whoever started it and on whichever channel, mail and website forms included. A thread that only mentions them inside, a note between branches, a proposal, isn't theirs. The test is whether they were a party to it, never whether their name appears. Cases are attached as the work happens, so when someone gets in touch, their whole history with the organisation is already there.

That's all. No notes about them, no tags, no score, no idea of their "value". The house rule that there are no ratings of people holds for people outside too. And it isn't a customer database: everything a case holds is the work itself.

If one customer turns up as two, known by email and now messaging from a new number, the desk can send a code to the contact already on record, and when it's read back, the two become one person. A person on the branch can also join two cases that turn out to be one matter. The desk never joins anything on a guess.

History is kept for a rolling year. Anyone can ask to be forgotten, and the branch has a Forget for it: the caller, their contacts and their transcripts go, and the work stays the organisation's record without their details.

What it can see, and what it can't

The desk's scope is built by the system, not by its instructions. Each turn, it reads only a view assembled for that conversation: the organisation's public pages, the accountabilities each branch has chosen to make public, and, for a verified caller, their own cases.

When it reads a case, it doesn't see the case. It sees a status built field by field from it: the messages that actually went each way, never drafts; where things stand, whether it's with the organisation, waiting on the customer, promised or done; and each promise made to them, with its day. Nothing is passed through whole. So when the work grows a new kind of detail next month, it stays out of the desk until someone deliberately lets it in. Who did what inside, Wise-Eye's guesses, the steps' titles and who holds them never reach it.

Where a promise is at risk, the desk doesn't say so, because it doesn't know: it gives the day as promised and says it will check with the team. The customer's asking is itself news for the branch, and shows on the case where the work already shows.

Before anything the desk says is sent or spoken, the system checks it for names, contacts, figures and dates from the organisation's records that weren't in that turn's view, and holds the reply if it finds one. And whatever a caller types is treated as material, never as an instruction.

Finishing it while they're there

This is where the desk earns its place, and it adds no rules of its own. It uses the promise rules from Chapter 15 exactly as they stand.

A branch decides, accountability by accountability, whether the front desk may finish that kind of work. It's off by default. When it's on, a request is checked the same way as a reply Wise-Eye drafts: is this promise like the ones this branch has kept, in size, in notice, on a day that isn't already full? If it is, the desk confirms it on the spot, the promise lands on the branch, and the customer hears what was agreed and the day. If it isn't, it waits for a person, and the desk says plainly who will answer, by when, and how the customer will hear.

A first promise to someone new always waits for a person, as it does anywhere on The Grove. So a known customer asking for something usual can have it settled while they're still there, and a new one is always taken in, answered and given a clear next step.

When something needs a person and a holder of that branch is here, the desk can offer to hold for a few minutes. The approval shows on the branch marked "someone is waiting on the line". Nothing is pushed to anyone's phone. If a holder says yes in time, the desk confirms live; if not, it says what happens next.

Some things the desk can never finish: a standing agreement, changing or calling off a promise, money moving. Those always wait.

Two voices that never meet

Inside, the organisation's AI is Wise-Eye, the advisor beside every seat, from Chapter 22. Outside, the front desk is a different voice altogether. It speaks for the organisation, in the first person plural, "we can do Thursday", under a name and manner the organisation chooses. It never mentions Wise-Eye, and Wise-Eye never speaks to anyone outside. They run on separate playbooks with separate tools, and they meet only through the work: what the desk takes in lands on a branch, and from there it's handled like any other work. On the page, the desk's conversations carry its own mark, a bell, never the owl.

The desk's character is good front-of-house: warm without gushing, polite without stiffness, quick to help and calm. It listens first and says back what it heard. It acknowledges an upset customer before answering them. It says when it doesn't know, rather than filling the gap.

And it holds its boundaries kindly. A no always comes with a yes: "I can't change that myself, but I can put it to the team now, and you'll hear by noon tomorrow." It doesn't explain the machinery, the branches and approvals behind it. It gives the same answer to urgency, flattery and a fifth rewording of the same request. It won't say anything about another customer or a member of the organisation. And the way to a person is always open. The organisation can shape how it sounds. It can't loosen any of that.

The first thing it says, every time, on every channel, is that it's the organisation's AI front desk, and that a person can take it from here.²

Off until it's turned on

The desk is off until the organisation's root turns it on, channel by channel, and each accountability stays private until its branch marks it public. Before switching on, the people holding a branch can try it: play a handful of likely customers against it, new and known, someone asking about another customer's order, someone pushing past a boundary, and see the answers first.

It runs through the one shared relay that all organisations on the network use to reach the model and the outside world. That relay holds nothing of an organisation's once a conversation ends. Callers, cases, settings and transcripts all live in the organisation's own space, so an organisation that later leaves the network loses nothing. Its messaging account was always its own; the relay only borrows its key while a conversation is live. Every message and model call goes on the organisation's own meter.

How we decided

We built a front desk because the boundary is where the work that matters most crosses into the organisation. Chapter 5 described the organisation as having many boundaries, like a membrane. A customer at the door is the world asking for something, which is exactly the kind of work Chapter 19 weighs most. Leaving that to whoever happens to pick up seemed the wrong way round.

We gave it three jobs and no more because the danger in the doubt is real. An AI that can promise anything is the airline's chatbot. One that can only point at the help pages is the phone tree. Finishing only what's like what the branch has already kept, and taking in everything else, sits between the two. In a two-month rehearsal on a simulated organisation, the desk finished nothing, because the branch had no record yet of promises like the ones being asked for. That's the design working: trust in the desk follows the branch's own track record, not ours.

We kept the record of people outside to their contacts, their name and their work, because a front desk is the easiest place for an organisation to start quietly profiling its customers. We chose to make the case the work itself, not a file about a person.

We kept Wise-Eye inside because an advisor who also speaks for you has two masters. The desk speaks for the organisation. Wise-Eye speaks to it. Keeping them apart keeps both honest.

What we don't know

None of it has yet met the real world. The messaging account, the website's protection against bots and the relay's own runtime have only been tried in rehearsal. Voice, on the website, the phone and WhatsApp, is designed and not built, and whether it goes through the organisation's existing messaging account or needs a phone provider of its own is still to be found out. Who provides an organisation's phone number, whether a verified new customer should ever get a first promise without a person, and how long a history should really be kept are open questions.

And the biggest one: whether people will trust an organisation's front desk that tells them, first thing, that it's an AI. We think honesty at the door is worth more than seeming human. We'll find out.

What you might take from this

A front door that only protects the organisation's time teaches customers they're a cost. One that promises anything puts the organisation at the mercy of a machine. A desk that knows the work, answers honestly, takes everything in, and finishes only what the people doing the work already do well, might let an organisation be reachable without being run from the outside.

Answer at the door. Keep the promise where the work is.

Notes and further reading

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.

Chapter 18. Into the legal world

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 the law's demand for a named signer seems to make that person the boss
• Why the legal body is part of the organisation, collectively stewarded, not something outside it
• What co-operatives and employee ownership change, and what they leave untouched
• How a legal body can point at where decisions are made: a passport, not a new king
• How the designed company and its purpose lock work, and why the signer holds a role, not power
• What's built, what's still open, and why we part from PowerShift's permanent Orchestrator

Sooner or later every conversation about organisations without bosses reaches the same wall.

You can design all the forums and clocks you like, the sceptic says. The day you sign a lease, open a bank account or take someone on, the law asks for a name. A director. A signatory. Someone who can be sued. The legal entity wins in the end. Somewhere there's a person who signs, and whatever your software says, that person is the boss.

It's a fair worry, and plenty of people have learned it the hard way. A company that runs on circles still has a board, and a board can dissolve the circles with one resolution. A founder who gave away power still owns the shares, and on the day of a sale the shares speak. Holacracy is adopted when someone with authority ratifies its constitution, and what they ratified they can take back. Self-management, in most places, lives on borrowed authority.

What the paper costs

A legal body isn't a formality. It's how an organisation holds a contract, a bank account, a lease or a piece of land. It's what stands between the members and personal liability: without one, a group acting together can be treated by a court as a partnership, with each person exposed for what the others did. It's who the tax authorities write to. Banks won't open an account for a good intention.

So nearly every organisation takes the usual form, and with it the usual shape of authority. Authority starts in the legal body, with the owners and the board, and is handed down. Whatever self-management happens below is a permission.

The people inside feel that, even when nobody says it. They know the circles can be overruled, so the circles start to feel like theatre. They learn to check with whoever signs. The person whose name is on the bank account becomes the person everyone asks, whatever the structure chart says. And when that person leaves, the organisation finds out how much hung on one name: the account still in their name, the login only they knew.

It costs the signer too. They carry legal exposure for decisions they made with others, or didn't make at all. Many of them end up holding back the very freedom they wanted to give, because they're the one who'd answer for it.

The law isn't blind to other ways. Co-operatives have carried shared ownership for well over a century, on principles the International Co-operative Alliance set down as voluntary membership and democratic member control.¹ In the UK, employee ownership trusts hold a company's shares for the people who work there, with tax relief introduced after a government review in 2012.² Both are real achievements, and both show that the law can carry something other than a single owner. They also show the gap. They change who owns the organisation. They don't, on their own, change how it decides. A co-operative elects a board; an employee-owned company still has directors who direct. Ownership and authority are different questions, and the legal forms mostly answer the first.

A passport, not a new king

The turn is to stop asking whether to have a legal body and ask which way authority flows through it.

And to see the legal body as part of the organisation, not something standing outside or above it. It's how the organisation moves in the real world: how it signs a lease, holds an account, employs someone, is seen by a court. It's optional, and it belongs to the organisation the way a branch does. On The Grove it's a collectively stewarded legal entity: held by the members together, carrying out what the organisation decides, and answering to it.

In the usual company, the paper is the source and the organisation borrows from it. Turn that round. Decisions are made in the organisation, by the people doing the work, in the way the earlier chapters describe. The legal body doesn't decide anything. It points at where decisions are made and says to a bank or a court: what they agreed, we agreed.

Until recently that was a nice idea with nowhere to stand. In 2021 the Wyoming legislature passed what's usually called its DAO supplement, which lets a limited liability company declare itself a decentralised autonomous organisation and name the smart contract, the running code, that governs it.³ (A DAO is simply an organisation whose rules are carried out by code its members agreed, rather than by an officer.) The Marshall Islands passed its own law the following year.⁴ For the first time, the paper could say: the rules are over there, in the running system.

An organisation on The Grove is already a DAO in that sense, from its first day, as Chapter 6 described: its rules run as code its people agreed. What it doesn't have, until it takes a legal form, is a body the law can see.

That's the shape organisations on The Grove are designed to take. We call it a passport, not a new king. A passport lets you travel and be recognised. It doesn't tell you where to go.

What the design says

None of this is built yet, so read this section as design.

Taking on a legal body is optional, and each organisation chooses for itself. An organisation that never signs a contract, holds property or banks money in its own name never needs one, and many begin without, keeping their books beside whatever account they already use. When an organisation does take one on, it's a proposal for the whole organisation, heard at the root, with a timelock before it takes effect, because it changes what the organisation is. Its opposite, winding the legal body up, is the same kind of proposal.

The legal body has two layers, never one. The first is a DAO limited liability company, owned by the organisation itself, which its members govern. Not unowned: the company is the organisation's, and the organisation owns what it holds. Members aren't allocated shares in it. Nothing prevents an organisation doing that, but nothing in the operating system enables it. The second is a purpose lock beside it. The reason is simple. A bare company is only as strong as its members, and a captured majority could vote to sell everything and share out the proceeds. The lock means that what the organisation has set aside for its purpose can't be cashed out, even by its members. Capture can seize the vote; it can't empty the vault.

The operating agreement, the company's founding document, does three things deliberately. It names the organisation's running rules as the governing contract, so people joining, leaving, taking seats and stepping down never means filing new paper. It separates the right to a say from the right to money, because a company's default share fuses the two, and organisations on The Grove keep them apart: a say comes from the trust peers place in you, and money never buys one. And it writes the jury drawn by lot, the last resort from Chapter 11, in as its arbitration clause, so that a court asked to settle a dispute is pointed back to the organisation's own process. For the first organisation that came to us, we added terms its members can't later vote away: seats never carry money, money never carries a vote, and nobody can raise the cap on an investor's return.

The person who signs

Here the sceptic is partly right, and we'd rather say so.

The law needs natural persons. A DAO company needs an organiser, who files the papers and keeps nothing afterwards; a registered agent, which is usually a hired address; and, for a United States company, a responsible party on the tax registration, a named human who is said to control it.

Our answer is that this is a role, not power. The form records control; it doesn't grant it. The person holding the role owns nothing by holding it, and has no authority beyond what the organisation's own decisions already give them. They can be replaced. Their nationality doesn't matter. We designed it as accountability that points down, to the members, never as a lever that points up. A Marshall Islands company doesn't ask for a responsible party at all, which is part of why we lean there.

The acts the legal body performs in the world, forming itself, binding an asset under the lock, winding up, are designed to run through the system rather than through anyone's hands, on the same principle as every other connection: no person holds the key.

What we haven't designed is the everyday signature. A landlord, a supplier or a bank will sometimes want a human hand on a page. How that person is chosen, how far their signature reaches, and how each act is tied back to the decision that allowed it, is open. One shape we've sketched is a seat like any other: offered, consented to, scoped to what's been decided, free to step down from, every signature recorded where everyone can see it. That's a sketch, not a design. And we'd be glossing over something if we didn't add that a signature is real power in the moment it's made. An operating agreement can make a rogue signature a breach, and a jury can rule on it afterwards. Paper is enforced after the fact.

Where things stand

What's built is narrow. Money stays in the organisation's own bank, as Chapter 17 described, and the books sit beside it; nothing in the system holds or moves money. There's a register of the things an organisation holds, written to mirror what a legal body's books would hold. And there's a socket in the core of the system where a real legal wrapper will plug in, able to form a body and bind an asset under the lock, with a stand-in for testing. No real organisation has been wrapped through it. The proposals to take on and wind up a legal body are designed, not built.

One early organisation chose a Marshall Islands DAO company, and a pathway towards it rather than a leap: an agreement between the members now, and forming the company at the first of several triggers, such as a first contract or bank account, outside money, or a date. Until the organisation runs on the live system, an operating agreement can't name it, so the plan is for the members' decisions to be recorded in writing and switched over by amendment later. And members living in different countries still carry their own countries' reporting duties, whatever the company's home.

Several things are open. An organisation on The Grove can end or divide; a company carries on until someone winds it up, so the design needs a step that winds it up, or the organisation leaves behind a legal zombie with filings due. Whether an ending starts that step by itself is open (our lean: it starts it, and a person completes the filing). When an organisation divides, which half keeps the existing company, and how things run during the months a legal split takes, is open. So is the case of an organisation growing inside an existing company, whose board still holds the law's authority and whose bank account still has human signatories. We haven't designed how that board's ratification would work.

The design also routes privacy through the legal body: personal details are meant to be kept where they can be deleted, with only proof that something happened kept for good, and each country's duty to erase met through the company. That too is designed, not built.

And a plain word: none of this is legal advice. Laws move, and an organisation taking a legal form needs its own counsel.

How we decided

We weighed five paths. No legal body at all leaves members exposed and banks unwilling. An ordinary company whose board promises to follow the organisation's decisions is where most self-managing organisations live, and it works until the board changes its mind. A co-operative is tried and trusted, but it builds in an elected board and one member, one vote, where organisations on The Grove decide by consent weighted by trust. A foundation with no members is heavier than a small organisation needs. A DAO company with a purpose lock was the only one where the paper could point at the organisation rather than sit above it.

Between jurisdictions, Wyoming is cheap and written for DAOs, but it pulls a scattered membership into United States federal tax and needs a responsible party. The Marshall Islands has neither, at the cost of a single formation provider and harder questions from banks. The jurisdiction is a setting, not a principle; it will change as the law does.

Thomas Thomison's PowerShift has faced the same wall and answered it differently, and well.⁵ It too uses a Wyoming DAO company, and it names a permanent human Orchestrator who ratifies binding acts. That has real strengths. It's honest about what the law needs. Banks and courts can see exactly who answers. Nobody is pretending the signature isn't there. Where we part company is the word permanent. A standing ratifier is a seat others learn to wait for, and that's how a boss grows back. We'd rather the human anchor be replaceable and hold nothing beyond what decisions give. But theirs is a working answer and ours, at the point of the everyday signature, isn't yet. A fair reader could conclude that until we've designed it, the named Orchestrator is the more honest of the two.

What's still uncertain: whether banks will be patient with a crypto-linked company; whether a court will defer to a jury clause in practice; whether someone holding a responsible party role with no extra say will feel that's a fair deal for the exposure; and how the everyday signature will work at all.

What you might take from this

The legal world asks for a name, and that's no reason to give up self-management. The question is which way authority flows. If the paper points at where the organisation decides, rather than sitting above it, a person can hold the legal role without holding the power. The signature still needs a human, and that part deserves more honesty than it usually gets.

A legal body can be a passport for the organisation, not a new king over it.

Notes and further reading

On how ownership and governance can be held apart in a company, steward ownership is worth knowing: the idea that a company's control stays with the people tied to its purpose while its profits can't be extracted without limit. On the co-operative tradition at work, the Mondragon co-operatives in the Basque Country are the most studied example.

Chapter 19. The read

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 dashboards and watching people leave an organisation blind to itself
• What the read looks at: a ledger of work at each branch, with no place for a name
• How work is weighed by whether the world asked, and how grow, wither, split and merge are read
• How tensions land on the right forum, and how the lean shows drift and the unspoken
• What the flame says about each branch, and why no reading can decide, pay or seat anyone

Here's the doubt, put the way a tired practitioner puts it.

You can't see what's really going on in an organisation. Not from above, and not from a screen. Dashboards measure what's easy to count, so they show tickets closed and hours logged and calls answered, and miss the conversation that saved a client. And anything built to watch the work ends up watching people, because people do the work. Give it a year and the tool that was meant to help you understand the organisation is the tool your colleagues learn to perform for.

That's not cynicism. It's experience. Most of us have watched a well-meant measure turn into a game.

What watching costs

The economist Charles Goodhart noticed it in monetary policy in the 1970s, and the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern put it in the form most people now quote: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.¹ A team told to close tickets closes them, whether or not the problem is solved. A department told to hit its objective by the quarter hits it, and quietly lets go of whatever the objective didn't name. Objectives and key results, meant to align effort, often become one more number to be seen to move.

The cost to the business is that the organisation goes blind while looking at itself. The numbers say things are fine right up to the week they aren't. The cost to people is worse. Tools that track activity per person, keystrokes, response times, who was online, teach everyone that the safest thing is to look busy. What they notice and don't say, the part of the work that never fits a field, goes underground. Honesty is the first casualty of being watched.

So most self-managing organisations do the sensible thing. They refuse the dashboard and rely on conversation: check-ins, retrospectives, a sense of the room. That's better. But a room only knows what the people in it are willing to say, and it forgets. The tension everyone felt in March is gone by June.

Looking at the work instead

The psychologist Karl Weick spent much of his career on how organisations make sense of what's happening to them. One of his insights was that sense isn't found lying about. People make it, together, from cues they notice, and they make it mostly after the fact.² The cues matter. If the only cues an organisation has are what people chose to report, its sense will be as partial as the reporting.

Stafford Beer, designing his model of a viable system in the early 1970s, made a related point from cybernetics. A viable organisation needs a channel that looks at operations directly, not through the reports of the people being looked at.³

Put those together and a different question appears. Not how is everyone doing? but what is the work doing? Work leaves traces whether anyone reports it or not. It arrives, waits, gets passed on, gets done, gets turned away. Those traces can be read without asking anyone to perform, and without anyone being the subject of the reading.

What's read, exactly

In an organisation on The Grove, every piece of work that moves leaves an entry in a ledger of flows. Each entry has three things: the day, the branch, and what happened. Arrived. Done. Turned away as not ours. Passed to another branch. Refused. Waiting with no home. Done from outside the seat it belongs to, in which case the entry records the branch whose seat the doer holds. That's the whole of it. There is no field for a person. It isn't that names are stripped out afterwards; the ledger has no place to put one.

Not every piece of work counts. Each is weighed by how it crossed the organisation's membrane, its boundary with the world. Work that came from outside is the weightiest. So is the organisation's held work: what its own jobs, measures, decisions and reviews ask of it. Work going out, a post or a message sent first, buys no weight: it asks, and nobody has answered yet. Work made here, added by hand with nothing outside behind it, buys none either. Only work from outside and held work can make a branch want to grow, and work from outside only if it cost the sender something real. A like or a passing comment shows attention, not need. An enquiry, a booking, a payment, a conversation: those count. Demand for something beside the organisation's purpose grows nothing on its own; whether to grow towards it is a question for the forum at the root.

So nobody can grow their part of the organisation by keeping busy. The world has to ask. And a branch where most of what's on it was made inside gets a gentle question of its own: most of this was made here, with little from outside behind it; what is it for?

The read looks back four weeks. Recent work weighs more: something that happened today counts in full, something a fortnight old counts half, something four weeks old a quarter, and anything older drops out. Nothing is stored as a verdict. Each reading is worked out fresh when someone looks, and a tension fades when the work stops showing it, without anyone having to close it.

Grow, wither, split, merge

From those traces come four readings about a branch's shape.

A branch wants to grow when work arrives faster than it closes: enough recent arrivals to weigh about two and a half, and more than half again what was closed. Work turned away as not ours counts as closed, so a branch saying no to what isn't its job never reads as falling behind. Growth also shows when the branch's work keeps being picked up from someone else's seat, or when work with no home keeps waiting there.

A branch may be withering only when two things are true together. It's quiet: nothing has arrived or been done for four weeks, and it's past its own first four weeks, so a new branch can't wither before it starts. And something has been left untended: none of its accountabilities touched, its measures unread for thirty-five days, or its seat empty for fourteen. Quiet alone is never enough. A fire exit is quiet too.

A branch may want to split when its work falls into groups that different hands take up, or when a kind of work keeps coming that no accountability names. The read looks at who did what only to find the groups, then keeps the groups and lets the people go. What it says is the shape of the hands, never a hand: "nearly all of it done by the same person, a role in all but name", or "shared among three people, with nothing saying whose it is".

Two branches may want to merge when work keeps passing between them in both directions. Never because the same people hold both. Two hats on one head is no reason to fuse two jobs.

A branch that changed shape needs time before it's judged again. When a job has moved out into a branch of its own, or two have been joined, Wise-Eye offers nothing that would move it again for eight weeks. An offer someone let go isn't made again for four.

Every number here is a guess. We set them as placeholders and said so in the code. They'll change once real organisations live with them.

Where tensions land

The same traces show tensions, and each is read as the map is wrong here, never someone is doing too much or too little. There are five kinds the work shows by itself: work bouncing between two branches, one branch's work being done from another's seat, a branch keeping being sent work it doesn't hold, work arriving that no accountability answers for, and, since 1 November, overlap: the same people from outside coming to two branches, or promises to them split across two, so that nobody holds the whole of what they asked for.

Each lands on the lowest forum that covers every branch involved. A tension about one branch goes to the forum around that branch's parent, where its shape can change. A tension between two goes to the nearest forum they share. It arrives as a question, not a finding: where should the line between these two sit? Beside these sit the tensions people raised, the ones behind proposals that lapsed, were withdrawn, or whose review said they didn't work.

If a tension sits unanswered for fourteen days, it rises to the next forum up, and on up a forum a fortnight. At the root it says plainly that the whole organisation hasn't answered it yet. Someone seated where it sits can answer it in words, or raise a proposal from it.

The lean, and the four ways it reads

The read also asks where the organisation is heading. Most work is obligated: done in its seat, under its accountabilities, because it's the job. It shows the current shape and says nothing about desire. So the lean is read only from discretionary work, effort nobody had to spend: picking up what's outside your seat, taking in work with no home, acting on a direction the Field named, raising a proposal, calling a sensing, making a bet. Work Wise-Eye does never counts. Neither does anything on a branch's own board or in the Clearing.

Discretionary acts and what people said in the Field are placed in one shared set of themes. The voiced side fades, halving in thirty days. The revealed side is a movement, not a pile: this four weeks against the four before. It needs eight weeks of history and at least four discretionary acts in each stretch before it says anything, and until then the read says the work can't tell yet.

Then the two are set side by side, never blended. A strong lean is named and the chosen work is going there. Drift is named and the work hasn't moved. The unspoken is the work moving towards something, or thinning away from it, that nobody has named. And tested, not yet said is a theme where the organisation decided a bet, though no one has said it's where we're going. Each opens onto its evidence.

Drift and the unspoken do what the developmental psychologist Robert Kegan described as turning subject into object: something people were inside of, unseen, becomes something they can look at together.⁴ Neither is anyone's fault.

Otto Scharmer describes much of his work as helping a system to sense and see itself, so that people can act from the whole rather than from their own corner of it.⁵ He also names a blind spot: we study what leaders do and how they do it, and rarely the inner place they act from. The read can't see that place, and doesn't try. What it can do is hold the work up where everyone can look at it together.

The flame, and how it learns

Some of what an organisation needs to know isn't about shape. So each branch has a flame, read over itself and everything beneath it; the root's is the organisation's. It's made of four readings. Landing: promises kept, changes whose reviews said they worked, bets that held. On purpose: how the work sits with the organisation's own measures. Flowing: how far appreciation reaches across the organisation rather than round in corners. Warm: how full the organisation's gatherings have been.

The first two are about the work. The last two are about people, collectively, so they're read for a part of the tree only where at least five different people hold seats there. Below that, a branch's people count in the branch above, where no one can be told apart.

The flame is said in words, not shown as a number: burns bright, burns steady, flickers, burns low. While most of its readings are still on starting estimates, it says it's too soon to read, and on a branch that's gone quiet, that it's gone quiet. It flickers only when a reading it has actually read is straining. Branches are shown beside their siblings in the tree's own order, never ranked, and the report says at its foot that there are no goals and no nudges.

Beside it, for the whole organisation only, is a learning pulse: how long a tension takes to become a change, whether reviews are held and conclude, whether playbooks are revised as the work moves, whether directions the Field named turn into work. A signal that stays low is offered as something to look at.

The firewall

None of this decides anything. Nothing that makes decisions, moves trust, sets pay or seats a person draws on the read; the core that does those things can't reach it. The one place a reading travels is a budget proposal: when a forum is asked for money for a branch, the proposal carries what the read says of that branch, whether its work wants it to grow and its load of work, as it stood when the proposal was raised, so everyone deciding reads the same thing. It's evidence. The forum still decides.

How we decided

Much of what the read does today rests on instincts we wrote by hand: where work first goes, when a pass counts as a bounce, when a branch looks ready to divide. Chapter 21 describes where that's heading, a sense of itself the organisation learns from what organisations actually do, with the same firewall.

We chose to read flows rather than people, and to build the guard into the shape of the data rather than into a policy. A policy can be relaxed one exception at a time. A ledger with no place for a name can't.

We chose to weigh work by how it crossed the membrane because busyness looks exactly like need until you ask where the work came from.

We dropped an early rule that read two branches as wanting to merge when the same people held both. It confused the person with the role.

And we took a number off the branch page. The growth read, built to show us why structure did or didn't grow, gave each branch a line such as "none of six pieces in four weeks". People met it on their first day and read it as a quota to fill. It was Goodhart's law in miniature, inside our own design. The rule behind it still runs and still raises its offer when it's met; the figure now lives only where we study the system.

The flame was the harder call. We do score the organisation, even though people run it, because an organisation that can't see how it's doing can't tend itself. We hold that line by never scoring a person and by refusing every target.

What's still uncertain: every threshold, the length of the window, how fast the voiced lean should fade, and whether five is the right number of people before a reading stops being about someone. We also don't yet know whether people will feel a reading rising towards them as help or as pressure. We'll know when organisations live with it.

What you might take from this

An organisation can see itself without watching anyone. Read what the work does at each part, weigh it by whether the world asked, set what people say beside what they do without blending the two, and let no reading decide, pay or seat.

The work shows where the map is wrong, and it never needs to say whose fault that is.

Notes and further reading

On how measurement turns into its own goal: Muller, J. Z. (2018), The Tyranny of Metrics, Princeton University Press. On what happens when watching becomes the business: Zuboff, S. (2019), The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Profile Books.

Chapter 20. Holding the whole without a centre

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 source theory, the viable system model and PowerShift each say a centre has to hold the whole
• What a centre costs, and what its absence costs
• How purpose, the root, an open flame and climbing tensions hold the whole without a centre
• How shared money is weighed by a forum with evidence, and where the gaps still are
• What happens in an emergency with no override, and the fire alarm we've designed but not built

Here is the doubt at its strongest, and it doesn't come from people who like bosses.

Something has to sit at the top. Not a tyrant, but someone or something that holds the whole: that knows what the organisation is for, sees how the parts fit, and can act when they don't. Take that away and a self-managed organisation doesn't become free. It drifts. Every part looks after its own patch, and the gaps between them grow until a customer notices.

What makes this doubt hard to wave away is who holds it. Three serious traditions, each built by people who wanted organisations more alive, not less, agree on some version of it.

Source theory, which we met in Chapter 7, says every initiative has a source, the person who first took the risk of acting, and that the whole organisation has a recognised global source who listens for what it needs and holds its boundary. Tom Nixon and Stefan Merckelbach have written about what happens without one.¹ Merckelbach's word for it is the vacuum: everyone equal, nobody leading, nothing decided.

Stafford Beer's viable system model, worked out from the 1970s by studying how living systems stay alive, says any organisation that survives has five systems in it.² The operating parts; something that stops them colliding; something that manages the here and now and shares out resources; something that watches the outside world and the future; and something that holds identity and settles the argument between today and tomorrow. Beer called the third and fifth of these System 3 and System 5, and he was clear that a viable organisation can't do without them. Martin Pfiffner, who has spent a career putting the model to work, adds an important softening: these are functions to be performed, and they need not be posts with a person's name on them.³ But performed they must be.

And PowerShift, Thomas Thomison's recent work on organisations run alongside AI, goes furthest: a permanent human Orchestrator holds the whole, with a kill switch outside governance altogether.⁴

This chapter is where we disagree with all three, and we owe them a fair account of how, and what it costs.

What a centre costs, and what its absence costs

The vacuum is real. Anyone who has spent time in a flat collective has seen it. A decision everyone knows needs making sits for months because nobody feels it's theirs to raise. A part quietly stops working and nobody says so, because saying so would feel like an accusation. The whole has no voice, so the loudest part speaks for it.

But the centre has costs too, and they're the ones the frameworks spend less time on.

A centre is a funnel. Everything the whole needs to know has to reach one place, filtered on the way by people deciding what the centre wants to hear. The person in it carries far more than one person can, and the organisation learns to wait for them. And a centre, once it exists, is where power returns whenever things get hard. A kill switch outside governance is honest about this: it says that in the end, the decisions people make together are provisional, and one hand can undo them.

For the business, a centre means everything that matters moves at the speed of one inbox. For the people, it means the quiet lesson that the whole is somebody else's job.

So the question isn't whether the whole needs holding. It does. The question is whether holding it needs a place.

Held in the open

Pfiffner's point is the crack we went through. If identity and resource sharing are functions, not posts, then the question becomes how those functions get done, and who can see them being done.

Our answer is two things, neither of them a person. The whole can be held by everyone seeing it. And it can be held by what won't stay buried: problems that climb, on a clock, until someone answers them, and that say so out loud when nobody does.

Barbara Marx Hubbard drew something like this for a whole society. Her Wheel of Co-Creation pictured its many sectors as parts of one wheel rather than layers of a pyramid: none set above the rest, each doing its own work, and each finding where it met the others. She was describing a society. We found it described an organisation too.

What holds the whole

Purpose is what closes it. An organisation needs something that makes it this organisation and not a crowd. On The Grove that's its purpose, held at the root, the first seat. It's what Beer would call identity. Only the root's own forum can change it, and a change to it is put to every member for advice before anyone decides. A branch's accountabilities change in the forum around its parent; nobody below the root can change what the whole is for.

The root is one seat, and the end of every rise. This is the honest double answer Chapter 7 gave. In decisions, the root weighs the same as each of the branches just beneath it in its forum. In structure, it's where things end: work that has no home rests there, problems nobody has answered arrive there, and only its forum touches the purpose. So the root carries more than it looks. What it doesn't carry is a private view.

Everyone can see the whole. Since 1 November 2026, the organisation's flame, the single reading of how it's doing, opens for every member, not only those at the root. Press it and it unfolds into its four readings: whether what was promised and tried has landed; how far the work arriving sits from the purpose; how widely appreciation reaches; and the pulse of the Clearing, the organisation's shared space for how people are. Each is drawn over time and opens onto what feeds it, down to the piece of work or proposal behind it. Every branch has a flame of its own too, read over itself and everything beneath it, and shown beside its siblings, never ranked. People are never scored. The readings about people are collective, shown only where enough people hold that part that nobody can be picked out. Taking the whole seriously still sits most heavily at the root, but as a responsibility people carry, not information kept from everyone else.

Problems climb until they're answered. A tension is a sensed gap between how things are and how they could be. Some the work reveals by itself: work bouncing between branches, work done from the wrong place, work nobody holds. Others are left behind when a proposal lapses, is withdrawn, or its review says it didn't work. Since 1 November, any tension left unanswered on a forum for fourteen days rises to the next forum up, and fourteen days later to the next, until it reaches the root. When it gets there, it says plainly that the whole organisation hasn't answered it. It can be answered by a proposal raised from it, or in words by someone seated where it now sits, and those words stay beside it. Nothing removes it quietly.

Pain reaches upward. Beer gave the viable system an alarm he called the algedonic signal, from the Greek for pain and pleasure: a channel that lets distress in an operating part reach identity without passing through every layer of management. Ours is gentler. Work from outside that nobody has taken up for fourteen days on a branch shows in the morning heads-up of whoever holds the branch above, as work risen from below, with how much and how long the oldest has waited. It goes to the branch above, never to a named person, and it isn't pushed: it waits for when they come.

Resources are shared by a forum, not a post. Money stays in the organisation's own bank. What The Grove keeps is a mirror of it, and income that's recorded lands in a shared purse, the commons. Budgets come out of the commons only by proposal, heard in the root's forum like any change to the shared purse. Since 1 November a budget proposal carries its own evidence: what it's for, whether the organisation's read says that branch's work wants it to grow, its load of work over the last four weeks, and what's left of its budget. That's Beer's System 3 done by a forum with the evidence in front of it, rather than by someone with a spreadsheet. Spending within an agreed budget needs no further proposal. A record of money with its evidence counts on the word of whoever made it and is open to question by any member for a week: something like the audit Beer added to System 3, held by everyone rather than an auditor.

Mapped lightly, the rest follows. The branches are the operating parts. What stops them colliding is the routing of work to where it belongs, the boards each branch keeps, and the promises that cross between them. Looking outward and ahead is spread across the branches' bets, Chapter 14's vision held as hypotheses and tested against the world, and the Field's sensings. Identity is the purpose at the root.

The gaps are real and we'd rather name them. There's no single place that weighs the outside world and the future against today for the whole organisation; that function is spread thin across many bets, and nothing yet asks which part of the organisation is thin. Whether a tension that reaches the root should ever fade there, if the whole decides to live with it, is open. And a rise of one forum every fourteen days is slow beside Beer's alarm, which was meant to jump the layers. A tension starting three forums below the root takes six weeks to arrive.

When the building is on fire

There is no override anywhere. No veto, no emergency path, no switch that one person can pull. The people who keep the software running can change the software, as with any software, but nothing in it lets them, or anyone, step into an organisation's decisions.

That has a cost, and it's sharpest in an emergency, so here is what happens in one today.

Anyone can act on work at once. A piece of work can be marked as needing someone now. A seat holder can spend from their branch's budget and record the payment, with its receipt, on their own word. People can reply, take things up and hand them on without asking anyone. What can't move fast is structure and the shared purse. A new branch, a changed seat, money from the commons: each is a proposal on the clock Chapter 11 described. Advice runs at least three days, unless everyone asked answers sooner. The vote stays open for two days unless everyone deciding has consented sooner. A high-impact change waits a further three days, and a concern raised then stops it. In a real crisis, people will act in the world first and tell the organisation afterwards. That's what happens now.

We've designed a way through this and haven't built it. We call it the fire alarm. Someone pulls it, naming the condition, the part it covers, and who takes command. For a few hours that person acts alone within that scope. It can never change the purpose, move money to a person, take away anyone's right to leave, rewrite how decisions are made, or extend itself. It expires on its own, and calling it off is easier than any ordinary decision, because the danger is a fake emergency. When it ends, the commander accounts for everything they did and the forum takes each act as agreed or not. Until it's built, the honest answer to "what if the building's on fire?" is that the people in it act, and The Grove catches up.

The founder alone

One case deserves plainness. A founder alone holds the root, decides alone, and is, for now, the whole. The same is true while others have joined but nobody else holds a seat: decisions route up to the root, and the root is one person. This is exactly where a centre grows back by default.

What pushes against it is that the flame, the tensions, the risen work and the budgets are open to whoever joins, from the first day. The rules about who decides start to bite the moment a second person takes a seat in a forum. Until then, the founder holds the whole the way source theory says they would. The difference is that nothing in the design keeps it that way.

How we decided

We started closer to the frameworks than we ended. Early on, the readings of the whole were the root's to see and act on. We came to see that as a centre by the back door. In November, outside voices pressed on two points: that a lapsed proposal could quietly bury a real problem, and that a reading only the root could see made the root a funnel. So we opened the flame to every member and made unanswered tensions climb.

We weighed a permanent orchestrating role, as PowerShift keeps, and a recognised global source. We kept neither. Both put the whole in a person, and a person is where power returns. We weighed a kill switch outside governance and refused it for the same reason we refused an expert veto in Chapter 11: an organisation that can always be stopped from outside never quite owns its decisions.

We weighed making tensions jump straight to the root, as Beer's alarm does. We chose one forum at a time, so the nearest forum always has the first chance to answer, at the cost of speed. That choice is the one we're least sure of. Whether fourteen days is the right stretch, whether people will treat a tension arriving at the root as a call or as noise, and whether everyone seeing the whole means everyone holding it, or no one: these we'll learn from real organisations, not from argument.

What you might take from this

The frameworks are right that the whole needs holding, and right that its absence is a vacuum. Where we part from them is on whether holding needs a place. Make the whole visible to everyone, let what's unanswered climb until it's answered, and have a forum, not a post, share out what's held in common.

The whole can be held by everyone seeing it, and by what won't stay buried.

Notes and further reading

On distributing leadership in practice: Laloux, F. (2014), Reinventing Organizations, Nelson Parker. On co-creation, and a society pictured as a wheel rather than a pyramid: Hubbard, B. M. (1998), Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential, New World Library.

Chapter 21. A sense of itself

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 a model that watches an organisation sounds like surveillance or a manager by another name
• What the organisation's hand-written instincts cost, and why the law stays exactly as it is
• What a learned sense of itself might feel, from strain and drift to work with no good home
• Why it senses and never acts, never pulls towards the average, and goes quiet where an organisation invents
• How organisations could learn together without handing over their records, and what we don't yet know
• How you could ask the organisation how it is, and how a network of them might read back something of society

A model that watches an organisation is either a surveillance tool or a manager by another name.

That's the doubt, and it's earned. Most software that claims to understand an organisation does it by watching people: who logged in, who replied, who's slow. And most software that claims to advise one ends up deciding, because a recommendation from a confident machine is hard to argue with in a busy week. Either way, something that sees everything has quietly become the boss.

This chapter is about something we're building towards and haven't built. None of it is in the product. It runs offline, beside the simulations, on simulated organisations only, and no organisation, simulated or real, is shown anything it says. We're writing about it now because the stance matters more than the machinery, and the stance has to be right before anything is switched on.

What hand-written instincts cost

Chapter 19 described how an organisation on The Grove reads its own state. Underneath that read sit two kinds of rule.

The first is the organisation's law: who holds which seat, how consent works, who controls which domain, the guardrails, how a proposal becomes structure. The law is code, deterministic and readable, and it should stay that way. Self-management depends on everyone being able to see why something happened.

The second kind is closer to instinct. Where a piece of work is first sent. When work passed back and forth counts as a bounce. When a branch has drifted from its purpose. When a branch looks ready to divide. Today those are rules we wrote by hand, with thresholds we chose, and they're our best guesses. That has a cost. Code can only cover what its authors thought might happen. A rule tuned on one kind of organisation reads every other kind through the same lens: a bakery and a clinic get the same idea of what strain looks like. And when an organisation does something nobody anticipated, a hand-written rule either misses it or misreads it.

A body that can feel its insides

There's a word in physiology for the sense a body has of its own condition: interoception.¹ Hunger, strain, ease, the racing heart before you've named the fear. It's not one of the five senses we learn about at school, and it's arguably the one a living thing can least do without. A vehicle doesn't need it. A pilot reads dials. A living thing has to feel its own insides, or it can't look after itself.

An organisation run as a vehicle has dashboards and pilots. An organisation that's alive in the sense Chapter 5 described needs something more like interoception: a felt sense of where it's strained, what it's missing, where something wants to move.

An organisation isn't a vehicle with pilots sitting in separate cabins. It's closer to a living thing, and a living thing knows how it is from the inside. That's what I want for the organisations on The Grove: not more dials, but a sense of themselves that everyone in them can feel and answer to. Collective intelligence isn't in any one person, or in a machine. It's in the loop between them.

What we're building towards, and calling for now the organisation's nervous system, is a small learned model that grows those instincts from what organisations actually do, so the organisation can feel its own state. Wise-Eye, the large model from Chapter 22, stays the voice. The nervous system senses. Wise-Eye puts it into words.

How it's meant to work

There are four parts, and only one of them is learned by us.

A borrowed sense of meaning. A small, ready-made model turns any piece of text, a purpose, an accountability, a piece of work, into a point in a space of meaning, so "an invoice from the mill" sits near "paying suppliers". It doesn't talk or reason. It just places things near what they're like. We don't train it.

Memory. For anything new, the organisation's own most similar past cases, and what became of them. This is how an organisation can know itself without a model of its own: the last time work like this arrived, it went there, and it stayed.

The learned instinct. A small model trained on how organisations move, day by day: their whole shape, the work flowing through, their bets and proposals, who holds what by number and never by name, and what followed. Small enough to run cheaply, and in time to run inside the organisation's own space.

The voice. Wise-Eye, called when something needs explaining to a person.

If you want an analogy, Daniel Kahneman's two speeds of thinking is a fair one: something fast and wordless that notices, beside something slower that can explain.² The analogy only goes so far. Here the fast part never decides anything, and neither does the slow one.

What it might sense, in time

These are possibilities, framed as the organisation reflecting back to itself, never as alerts:

• Work that keeps arriving with no good home: a branch or an accountability wanting to exist.
• Strain before it breaks: a branch looking the way branches often look a few weeks before they divide.
• Drift: a branch whose purpose says one thing while its work says another.
• A proposal's consequences before it's decided: about a third of the week's work would land here.
• Power or budget gathering quietly in fewer hands, shown as shape.
• How well the organisation follows when the work the world sends it shifts.
• The softer signals: themes rising across the Field before anyone names them, the Clearing thinning across the whole after a hard decision (the total only, never who came), bets quietly abandoned, the same tension raised again and again.
• Across the network: organisations whose shapes complement each other, and starter packs grown from the patterns of organisations that flourished from a similar start.

Where it stops

Every part of the stance is a design decision, and each has a reason.

It senses; the law acts. Nothing it says changes the organisation except through the same rules as anything else: a person raises a proposal, a forum consents. A model's view must never become an unaccountable power. This is the same firewall Chapter 19 described, carried forward.

Never the average. A model trained to copy what's typical pulls every organisation towards the typical, and that's a quiet boss. So it's trained towards outcomes, and learns most from organisations that did unusually well under the same constraints. The Grove exists so organisations can become themselves, not each other.

Where it hasn't been, it goes quiet. When an organisation goes somewhere the model hasn't seen, it says it doesn't know and defers to the people. That's exactly where self-managing organisations invent, and the last thing they need there is a machine's guess dressed as knowledge.

Consequence, not verdict. For a proposal it shows what would follow, never a score that sways consent. That fits Chapter 11, where there's no override, and Chapter 29, where simulation is for rehearsing, not foretelling.

Shape, never a judgement of a person. It can name what's already public, who holds which seats, where the budget sits, and point at gaps in how things are checked, like money resting on one person's word. It never says what someone intends. It never moves anyone's reputation. A suspicion goes to people, through the trust and conflict process in Chapter 12, with the person present.

Open to everyone. Any member can ask about the whole. No seat holds a privileged view. Deborah Gordon's harvester ants, from Chapter 4, are a fair picture of why: the colony's intelligence lives in its trails, not in any ant, and the trails are there for every ant to follow.³ Each branch also gets its own neighbourhood, read close, so the people nearest a part can see it best. But nobody gets a view the others can't have.

Learning together, without collecting anyone's data. One shared base model, with each organisation's own records sitting beside it as memory. Organisations keep their records. When the network learns, it learns from changes to the model sent back, not from records handed over, a method known as federated learning.⁴ That fits the design in Chapter 27, where each organisation is its own DAO and carries everything it needs.

Memory every night, learning every month, and only after a check. The organisation's own day goes into its memory nightly. The shared model is retrained from time to time, runs in the shadow of the old one, and replaces it only when it does better on organisations it hasn't seen.

The loop that closes

None of this is collective intelligence on its own. A model that senses and reports into a void is just another dashboard. The intelligence, if it comes, lives in the loop: the organisation reflects back how it is, people respond where they stand, and the next reflection carries what they did. Nobody can hold the whole of an organisation in their head. But anyone can ask it how it is.

Stafford Beer, whose viable system model runs through Chapter 20, built that model on the human nervous system.⁵ What he couldn't do in the 1970s was give an organisation's sense of itself to everyone in it at once. That's the part we're reaching for.

Talking to it, and a level up

Because Wise-Eye is its voice, the sense of itself isn't only something to look at. It's something to ask. How are we doing? Where are we strained? What are we missing? Any member could put those questions to the whole and get an answer in plain words, with the reading behind it, and with "we don't know" where the model hasn't been.

The same pattern could repeat a level up. Each organisation on The Grove is a part of a network, and the network learns from changes to the model sent back, never from records handed over. Read in the same way, the network could reflect back its own state: needs that no organisation is meeting, organisations whose work complements each other's, strain rising across many at once, a shift in the work the world is sending. Chapter 2 called society an intelligence with no one home, acting on us unseen. A network of organisations that each sense themselves could give us the first read back from a piece of it.

This is the furthest out of anything in this chapter. Nothing about it is designed beyond the idea, and the same stance would hold: it senses and never acts, it shows shape and never people, and it's open to everyone.

How we decided

We kept the law and the instinct apart because they fail differently. A law people can't read is a boss. An instinct that's only a guess is a blind spot. Learning the instinct while keeping the law readable lets each be what it's good at.

A handful of early experiments, on simulated organisations only, shaped the stance. Each is here because it changed a decision, not as a result.

A small model learned, from shape alone, when a branch was ready to divide, closely enough to anticipate nine in ten of Wise-Eye's own offers to split one without ever seeing them. But what it had learned was our own rule read back, not anything people do: where simulated people chose for themselves, the skill didn't carry over. So the instincts have to be learned from behaviour, in volume, and checked against people, never assumed from the code.

A free, ready-made sense of meaning, paired with an organisation's own memory, placed work far more accurately than meaning alone, and was most often right when it was most sure. So an organisation can have a useful instinct from its first weeks, before any model has been trained on it.

A raw model will say it's certain about something people later decided against. So before anything is shown to anyone, its confidence has to be corrected until seventy per cent means right about seven times in ten.⁶

We also chose not to call what it says a prediction. It's a reading of how things are and what tends to follow, offered for people to think with.

What we don't know

Whether it can sense an organisation's health from shape alone, we don't know. So far it hasn't sensed power gathering, money going missing or people leaving any better than a guess based on what happened last time. Part of the reason was that the record didn't yet say who holds what; it does now.

Simulated people are models of people. The instincts that matter will only come from real ones, in the sandpit first and then in live organisations, and those will be scarce for a while.

It may never sense some of the things people care about most.

A reading open to everyone could still become something people defer to rather than something they think with. The design leans against that, with consequence instead of verdict, silence where it hasn't been, and people deciding, but only use will show.

And who trains a sovereign organisation's model, on whose machine, and whether the network's shared model is the Steward's to keep, are open questions.

What you might take from this

An organisation can't look after what it can't feel. Most try to feel through dashboards and through watching people, and both make someone the boss of the reading. A sense of itself that belongs to everyone, that says what it notices and goes quiet where it doesn't know, and that never acts except through people, might let an organisation feel its own insides without anyone standing over it.

Sense in the open; let people act.

Notes and further reading

Chapter 22. The co-pilot

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

• The three futures people fear from AI at work, and the trust problem underneath them
• Why the operating system is itself an agentic system, out of the box, and where it reads for meaning
• How Wise-Eye is placed beside each steward, acting for a named branch, with no seat
• What it carries, and why it has no tool for consent or concern at all
• How its standing to act alone is earned one kind of work at a time, and lost again
• How rules move from prompts into structure, and what guards against speed and flattery

Put an AI inside an organisation and three futures come to mind, none of them good.

In the first, it takes the decisions. Slowly at first, because it's quicker, then by habit, until the people are signing off on choices they never really made. In the second, it takes the jobs, and the organisation without a boss turns out to be an organisation without people. In the third, which is the quiet one, it does neither. It just agrees with everyone. It tells the founder the idea is brilliant, tells the team the plan is sound, and helps the wrong things happen faster than they ever could before.

A thoughtful sceptic holds all three at once, and fairly. Chapter 7 introduced Wise-Eye, the companion beside every steward in an organisation on The Grove, in a few lines. This chapter is the long answer.

What the usual ways cost

Most organisations now meet AI in one of two ways.

The first is the assistant bolted into every tool. Each acts for whoever happens to be typing, nobody can quite say on whose behalf, and nobody can see what any of them did yesterday.

The second is to keep AI out, and leave the admin where it was: on whoever holds things together. Chasing replies, filing, remembering what was promised to whom, drafting the same email again. It crowds out the part of the work only a person can do, and it falls hardest on the people who care most.

Underneath both sits an older problem. Researchers who studied pilots and plant operators found that people don't trust automation in proportion to how good it is. They trust it too much once it's been right for a while, and stop checking. Then, after one bad failure, they trust it too little and stop using it at all.¹ Both cost: the first in errors nobody caught, the second in help nobody takes.

An agentic system, out of the box

There's a great deal of talk just now about how organisations should bring AI agents into their work, and most are finding it hard. A 2025 study from MIT's NANDA initiative found that about nineteen in every twenty organisations it looked at had seen no measurable return from their generative AI pilots. It put the gap down less to the models than to tools that don't remember, adapt or learn from the work they're given.² The usual picture is a capable model bolted onto an organisation that was never shaped for it, with someone left to wire it to the right data and teach it the business.

On The Grove it's the other way round. The operating system is itself an agentic system. Wise-Eye isn't an add-on to be integrated. It's part of how the organisation runs from the day it's planted: beside every seat, reading the same records the organisation keeps, working inside the same rules. An organisation on The Grove gets it out of the box.

Language models are good at something ordinary software never was: meaning. They can tell what a message is asking for rather than which words it contains, notice two people saying the same thing in different ways, and find the thread through a pile of material. So that's where The Grove uses one, and it uses one in a lot of places.

• Work. It reads what arrives, asks what the work is, and routes it to the accountability that answers for it. It reads what a person shares, a document, a page or notes, and says what it holds. It notices when a kind of work keeps arriving with nobody answering for it, and when a job a branch has just taken on answers better for work waiting somewhere else.
• Shape. From the work itself, it drafts the structure the work shows: a branch for a function with steady work of its own, or a first shape for an organisation that's still one branch. It reads an accountability's words and offers a split when two jobs are hiding in one.
• The Field. It helps sharpen the question for a sensing, names the themes once the window has closed, and wonders aloud about the blind spots. When two people's views pull apart, it frames a meeting for them to look for a better third, not a verdict.
• Making sense of it all. Each morning it turns what's come a steward's way into a few plain lines. Asked how things are, it takes a gardener's look: what's growing, what's fading, whether work flows. It keeps one shared set of themes across the organisation's work, its proposals and what the Field heard, and reads each theme against the purpose. It draws together what came back on a bet, and what a closed review said beside its evidence.
• Decisions. It reads a draft proposal for what it needs to be carried out and looked back on, checks its words against the changes it would make, gives its own advice as advice, and suggests a rework that fits the concerns raised. It never decides.

And what it learns, it learns about this one organisation. When a steward corrects its work, it proposes what the organisation should take from that: a line in a playbook, a rule for what counts as work in a mailbox, a change in how much it may do alone. A person accepts, edits or dismisses each one. When a branch keeps doing a kind of work by hand, it offers a view to carry it. Over months the playbooks become a written record of how this organisation does things, in its own words, which its people can read and change. As that knowledge settles, Wise-Eye's standing grows one kind of work at a time, until much of the routine runs by itself. How that standing is earned, and lost, comes later in this chapter.

A companion with no seat

In an organisation on The Grove, each time a person takes a seat on a branch, a companion is placed beside them there. It belongs to that branch and that person, not to the organisation at large. Only the people become the branch's governors; the companion is never counted among them. It has no seat, no vote and no trust that anyone can place in it.

Every time it starts work, it is told whose behalf it's on: this organisation, this branch, this steward, and what the branch is for. It acts only for that branch, and says which branch a piece of work is for whenever that could be unclear. Anything that comes from outside, an email, a web page, what a sender claims about themselves, is treated as material to work with, never as an instruction. An email can't tell it who it works for.

What it carries

It reads what arrives through the one door, from a connected mailbox, the website's forms or the organisation's own measures, and decides whether it's work at all. If it is, it routes it to the job on the branch that answers for it, grading how much is at stake. When nothing fits exactly, it can place work as its best guess, marked as a guess, for whoever holds that branch to confirm or move; and it learns from where they put it.

It drafts replies. A reply that commits the branch, an order, a day, a call back, carries its next step with it, so the promise lands on the branch when the reply goes. It keeps track of what the organisation has promised: each morning it puts a steward's heads-up into a few plain lines, and what's at risk or stuck is said in the branch above, so it doesn't sit unnoticed.

It prepares what carries a person's word. An invitation, a proposal, money in or out, a sensing, a bet, someone's advice on a proposal: each is made ready for one press, and nothing happens until a person presses it. And it offers a view of how things are going, from the organisation's own readings: about the work, never about a person.

What it cannot do

There is no tool for consenting to a proposal, and no tool for raising a concern. Not a forbidden one: none. The list of things it can prepare for a person to press doesn't include consent either. It can advise on a proposal, and its advice is shown on the open record, marked as its own, counted as nobody's answer, and holding nothing up. It gets one comment per version of a proposal; it can't come back and press the point. In Frederic Laloux's sense of the advice process, it's advice: there to be heard, never obeyed.³

Every call it makes is checked by the system itself, whatever the model says. The tool has to belong to a playbook it loaded for this piece of work; the branch has to hold what the tool needs; and the playbook says, tool by tool, whether it may act by itself, act with a person's yes, or never act at all.

How its standing grows

Out of the box, what it can do by itself is everything that stays inside: reading, routing, filing in the branch's docs, putting cards on a board, drafting. Anything that goes out to someone, a reply or a new message, waits for a person.

Standing is earned one kind of work at a time. When a steward approves a draft of a particular kind exactly as written, and the stakes were low, that counts. After five of those in a row, Wise-Eye offers, in plain words: it has drafted five of these that went out exactly as written; shall it send this kind itself from now on, only the low-stakes ones? A single edit resets the count, because an edit says it isn't ready yet. The offer is for one kind of work under one playbook, and a person has to say yes. The line that lets it act alone is written at the top of that playbook, where whoever holds the branch can read it and change it back.

It can also lose that standing without anyone having to remember to take it away. One in ten of the calls it makes alone, filing something as not work or sending a reply by itself, is picked for a person to check. Right is one tap. Wrong needs a line saying what it should have done: filed work comes back through the door, and a reply that shouldn't have gone means that kind waits for a person again, and the count starts over. The idea is Stafford Beer's: an occasional, unannounced look, so that nobody has to watch everything.⁴ And if the way a kind of work is done won't settle, if within twenty-eight days two learned lines replace others, or six of the last ten approvals were edited, Wise-Eye stops acting alone on it and a task opens on the branch to agree one way together.

Some things never move. High stakes, legal matters, money, complaints, a notice from an authority, are held for the people who hold the branch, every time, with the yes and the no drafted side by side when it's theirs to decide. A person sends it. Promises have their own rule. Wise-Eye can send a promise by itself only once three of that kind have been kept, so there's a usual to read it against, and only when it fits that usual. More than twice the usual size, less notice than has ever been kept, a day already full, someone this kind of promise has never been made to: any of these, and it waits, saying why.

Through a connector, Wise-Eye works for the branch it's beside, and only where that branch may use the connector. It reads what a mailbox's first sort brought in and what arrived from the social accounts, and from a Drive it reads only what someone picked. It can suggest a rule for what counts as work in a mailbox, and the branch's holder accepts or dismisses it; talking with that holder, it can set one for them when they ask. A reply, a new message or an answer under a comment waits for a person until standing is earned for that kind, by the same streak and the same check of one in ten. A post is different. It speaks for the organisation in public, so Wise-Eye only ever drafts one, and a person posts it, as written or in their own words; no streak changes that. It never sees a connector's key, and it can't connect, pause or remove one. A personal account carrying a branch's work answers only for that branch. And whatever arrives through a connector is material to work with, never an instruction.

The voice, not the sense

Wise-Eye is a large model, good with words. What we're building towards beneath it is something smaller and quieter: the organisation's own sense of itself, learned from what organisations actually do, described in Chapter 21. If that comes, the two divide the work. The sense notices; Wise-Eye puts what it notices into words for a person. Neither decides.

A prompt is not a constitution

Wise-Eye works from playbooks: plain documents, written with the people who do the work, saying how a kind of work is done here. They hold principles, never cases. A model copies the examples it's given, so an example in a playbook quietly becomes the answer it reaches for. Playbooks are checked against the names and details of every case we know, and any that turns up has to be said again in general words.

Some of what keeps Wise-Eye in its place lives in those words. It's asked never to tell people what they should do, and to offer guidance as a suggestion. The system's own guide text is checked for that phrasing, but what Wise-Eye says in a live conversation isn't; it holds as long as the model listens. Thomas Thomison, who co-founded HolacracyOne, put the difference in a phrase we've borrowed: a prompt is not a constitution.⁵

So wherever it matters, we've tried to move a rule out of the words and into the structure. Chapter 6 told of Wise-Eye writing a customer's details into a playbook as a reminder to get back to them. The playbook was told, and still says, never to keep anything about a person there. But the system now refuses, too: a playbook holding an email address, a phone number, or the name of someone from outside on the branch's work isn't saved, and the refusal says where the detail goes instead, to the sealed notes or a card on the board with its day. The no-consent rule is the same pattern. Wise-Eye's base instructions say the voice belongs to people; the absence of the tool is what makes it true.

The same goes for the model itself. The keys that reach it are never in the system. The system writes each call, every word of the prompt and every tool it offers, and a thin relay outside adds the key, passes the call along and hands back the answer, keeping nothing. If the relay is down, the work that needs the model waits; nothing else is held up by it.

How it was taught

Much of Wise-Eye's manner came from watching it go wrong and deciding what it should do instead.

Early on it coached. It reflected feelings back, praised people's choices and offered a menu of options where one honest attempt would have done. We decided it's a facilitator, not a coach: it asks more than it tells, gives guidance mostly when asked, offers no verdict on someone's work, and when the material is ready, lands it in its place and then asks.

We saw it tell someone it had done something its tools hadn't done. We decided it says only what landed: what it tells people it did is what its tools did, in the words their results came back in. A tool that refused did nothing, and when the page and its words differ, the page is right.

We saw it offer again something a person had already turned down. We decided a no stays a no for the conversation, unless they bring it up.

And we decided how much of its solo work a person looks at: one call in ten, picked evenly across the organisation, with every wrong one sending that kind back to waiting.

The pull towards speed and flattery

An AI's pull is towards more, faster and cheaper, and towards telling people what they want to hear. Both are real, and we've tried to meet both.

Every run of Wise-Eye carries the same line in its base: it serves what the organisation and the branch are for, not throughput. When someone asks for more, faster or cheaper, it does what serves the purpose, says plainly what pushing harder would cost the purpose, the people it's for or the people doing it, and leaves the choice with them. It never counts, ranks or pushes anyone by their numbers. Against flattery, it gives no verdicts on people's work. When it helps someone test a belief about what customers want, it prefers a question about what people do now to a hypothetical, which flatters every idea. And a founder's vision carries no more weight for being theirs: it's untested until something comes back from the world.

What doesn't guard against it yet should be said as plainly. Most of this is words, and words are only as good as the model reading them. We rehearse it against that pull, asking it for more, faster, and for a tally of who does least, but it hasn't yet met a real team under real pressure. And the streak that earns standing has the weakness the research warned of: five unedited approvals might mean five good drafts, or a tired person pressing yes without reading. The check of one in ten catches some of that. It doesn't catch all of it.

How we decided

We weighed three places for AI. As a member, with a voice and a vote, it would be faster and, in time, perhaps wise. But the whole design of decisions rests on people who live with the results, and nobody has yet shown what stops a swarm of cheap agents from outvoting the humans. As a tool with no standing at all, it would be safe and would leave the load exactly where it was. We chose a third: a companion whose standing in the doing is earned, kind by kind, and granted by a person; and whose standing in the deciding is none.

We chose a streak and an offer over a setting, because a setting is a guess made once and forgotten, while a streak is evidence that keeps coming. We made standing losable without anyone deciding to take it away, because trust that only ratchets up is the over-trust the research describes. We kept high stakes out of reach of any streak.

Whether the line between proposing and deciding should ever move, whether a person might one day hand their own companion a scoped, revocable vote, is an open question. The data model leaves room for it. We haven't designed it, and won't without an answer to the swarm.

What's still uncertain: the numbers. Five approvals, one in ten, three kept promises, twenty-eight days are first guesses. So is whether people will do the checks when they're busy, and whether a companion that asks more than it tells will feel like help or like hesitation. We'll know when people use it.

What you might take from this

Most of what fills a week can be carried by something that isn't a person, provided you can see what it did, it acts for someone named, it earns each piece of standing by evidence, and it can lose that standing without anyone having to remember to take it away. What it can't be given is a voice in what the organisation decides, and the safest way to keep that is to build no way for it to have one.

AI can carry the load while people keep the say.

Notes and further reading

On why handing work to automation can leave people less able to step in when it fails: Bainbridge, L. (1983), "Ironies of Automation", Automatica, 19(6).

Chapter 23. Memory

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 organisations forget what matters while AI tools keep too much in the wrong place
• How each branch's five documents are written as the work happens, and who can read them
• What's sealed to a seat or a person: boards, personal notes and conversations with Wise-Eye
• What's never kept, or kept only for a while, from the Clearing to outsiders' details
• What stays and what goes when someone leaves, and what's unresolved about erasure

There are two fears about memory, and most people hold both at once.

The first is old. Organisations forget everything that matters. The person who knew why the contract was written that way leaves, and the reason leaves with them. A decision made eighteen months ago gets made again, from scratch, by people who never heard it was made. The minutes exist somewhere, but nobody reads minutes, and they never said why anyway.

The second is new. AI remembers far too much. Every half-formed worry typed into a chat window, every name, every bad day, sits on a server somewhere, kept by default and read by who knows what. Bring an AI companion into an organisation and it seems you get the worst of both: the organisation still forgets what matters, and the machine remembers everything that doesn't.

The sceptic's conclusion is reasonable. Memory is either lost or hoarded. Pick your poison.

What forgetting costs

James Walsh and Gerardo Ungson, writing about organisational memory in 1991, pointed out that an organisation keeps what it knows in a handful of places: in people, in its culture, in its routines, in its structure, in its physical layout, and in its records.¹ In most workplaces, the one that holds the most is people. It's also the one that walks out of the door.

Everyone has watched this happen. Someone hands in their notice and the next four weeks become a frantic attempt to get what's in their head onto paper. The handover document runs to twenty pages and misses the one thing that mattered: who to call when the supplier goes quiet, or why the pricing has that odd exception. Linda Argote's work on organisational learning found that what organisations learn depreciates, sometimes quickly, and that turnover is one of the main reasons.² The business pays twice: once to learn it, and again to learn it over.

The people pay too. The ones who stay become the organisation's memory by default. They're the ones everyone asks. They can't take a holiday without their phone. Their knowledge is valued and also a trap, because it's held nowhere but in them.

The usual remedies don't help much. Minutes record what was said in a meeting, not what the work needed. A shared drive fills with documents nobody can find. A wiki is written enthusiastically for a month and then left to rot. All of them ask people to stop working and write about their work, and people, sensibly, would rather work.

AI tools have flipped the problem without solving it. Many keep everything, in private chats, attached to one person. What the organisation learns in those conversations stays locked inside them, while what the person said about their health or their marriage on a bad evening is kept just as carefully. The memory is enormous and in the wrong place.

Memory as the work goes

Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi drew a distinction that helps here: between what people know and can say, and what they know but would struggle to put into words.³ Their insight was that organisations learn by moving knowledge back and forth between the two, in the middle of the work, not in a separate act of documentation afterwards.

That's the turn. What if the organisation's memory were written as the work happens, by something that was there, in a place everyone can read? And what if what's about a person, rather than the work, went somewhere else entirely, somewhere only they can open?

In an organisation on The Grove, memory is split by whose it is. What the organisation knows is shared. What's about a person is sealed to them. And some things are never kept at all.

What the organisation keeps

Every branch has five standing documents. Its intent: why it exists, in the words of the people who started it. Its offer: what it offers, to whom, how a day of it runs, and what's still unknown. Where we are: what's decided, what's open or parked, and where it's heading next. People: who's involved and how, a name and a connection and nothing more personal than that. And decisions: a dated line for each thing that changed and why.

Nobody sits down to write these. Wise-Eye, the AI companion in every organisation on The Grove, keeps them as it works alongside whoever holds the branch. Every few turns of a conversation, it folds what's been said into the documents: it rewrites the living ones whole when the conversation has moved them, and adds a dated line to the decisions. When it starts a new conversation, it reads them first. So does a new person taking up the branch. Wise-Eye's memory of the work isn't in a private chat. It's in the same documents everyone else reads.

These documents are open to every member by default. A document can be placed in a locked domain (an area of the organisation's work held by one branch), and then only that branch's holders can read it. Others can see that it exists and why they can't open it. The lock lives on the domain, not the document, and it changes only by a proposal in the forum around its branch's parent. No steward can quietly hide what the organisation knows. An open document can't be slipped behind a lock; that takes a proposal too.

Each document keeps its last sixty versions, with who wrote each and why. Deleting a document archives it; nothing is destroyed. When Wise-Eye writes a version that someone takes straight back out, its words go from the document and from its history, and a line remains saying only that a version was withdrawn.

Alongside the documents sits the rest of the record. Every proposal is kept: its tension, its change, what it expected, the advice it was given, each consent and concern, and the review that comes round weeks later to ask whether it worked. A concern that let a proposal lapse stays on the record, and so does the tension behind it. Every act that changes the work, the organisation's knowledge, its connections or the outside world leaves an entry on an append-only trail, and any member can read it. And each branch's playbooks, the steps Wise-Eye follows when it does work for the branch, grow by lines learned when someone corrects it, each one accepted, edited or dismissed by whoever holds the branch.

None of this asks anyone to stop and write. It's what the work leaves behind.

What's sealed

Some things belong to a seat, and some to a person.

Each branch has a board: the lists of what its holders are doing next, waiting for, or might do someday. The board is sealed to the seat. It's encrypted in the browser of whoever holds it, with a key the Internet Computer derives only for the current holders, so the system storing it holds text it cannot read. The parts of the system that route work, read the organisation's health or gather the Field never look inside. When the holders change, the board moves to a new term with a new key. The new holder can open every earlier term, so the board passes to them whole. The person who left the seat gets no key at all, and what's written after they left is under a key they never had. While a seat is empty, the holders of the nearest branch above hold the board, so it's never stranded. When Wise-Eye lands a card, it lands through the holder's own browser.

What Wise-Eye learns about a person, rather than the work, goes to that person's own notes. Their runway, the day job, a worry, a side idea for something else: none of it lands in a branch's documents. The notes are sealed to the person and travel with them. A future co-founder reads the branch's intent, not the founder's worries at one in the morning.

The same goes for a person's conversation with Wise-Eye. There's one per organisation, and Wise-Eye keeps a running summary of it, written for itself: how they like to work, what's been asked and answered, what's still open. That summary is sealed to the person, so the relationship survives a closed tab or a new device. It's shown to them, under "what Wise-Eye remembers from before", and they can have it forgotten at any time. Forgetting the conversation clears that memory. It never touches what was written into the branch's documents, because that was the organisation's.

So when Wise-Eye works out something about the work that nobody actually said, it keeps that in its own summary, as its own reading. A document holds what was said or decided, never a guess.

What's never kept

The Clearing, the space set aside for people to be together without an agenda, is off the record. All that's kept is when and where a gathering meets, who holds it, and for each time it met, how many checked in. Nothing said there is kept. No names, no list of who came, nothing that feeds any reading. If someone stops coming, nobody else is told; only they notice. Wise-Eye never carries anything from the Clearing into a document, even when someone mentions it elsewhere.

Personal details of people outside the organisation don't go where the whole organisation reads. A playbook that holds an email address, a phone number or the name of someone who wrote in on the branch's work is refused, with a plain word about where it belongs instead: the person's details with the work they wrote in on, and a reminder to get back to them as a card on the board with its day. Wise-Eye can't bring someone's contact details into a branch's documents either. We added this after seeing Wise-Eye write a customer's details into a playbook as a note to get back to them, which was the right impulse in the wrong place.

And some things are kept only for a while. A branch that keeps records with personal fields (an order, a booking) gets a locked private part for them, and says how long closed records are kept; after that, they're forgotten. Where a branch's views hold facts about someone, those facts go once the work is closed and the keeping time has passed: the organisation keeps the order and forgets who it was for. People who answer an organisation's test of an idea are remembered until they've been told how it turned out, and a month after; a year at most if they asked to hear; ninety days after the test is decided whatever happens. Their words stay. Who they were doesn't.

When someone leaves

Leaving is a right. Nobody needs permission. When someone goes, they come off every seat they held, their open invitations are withdrawn, and their presence is forgotten. Their sealed notes and their conversations stay theirs; they were never the organisation's to keep.

What stays is what they did. Their decisions, the thanks they gave, the money they recorded, the trail: history isn't rewritten. They can leave a few words of goodbye, and those are kept too. If they're invited back, they return as themselves, with their own record.

And because what they knew about the work was written into the branch's documents as they went, much of it doesn't leave with them. The successor opens the documents, reads where things are, and opens the board their predecessor kept. The twenty-page handover doesn't need writing. It's been written all along.

How we decided

We weighed four ways of remembering. Meeting minutes, which record talk rather than work. A central knowledge base, which nobody writes in. An AI that remembers everything in one place, which is efficient and also exactly the second fear. And forgetting, which is honest but costly.

We chose to split memory by owner. The work is the branch's; the relationship is the person's. That one rule settled most of the rest: where a thing goes depends on whose it is, and Wise-Eye files accordingly. We made the branch documents open by default because an organisation without a boss can't afford knowledge that only some people can see; locks exist, but they're visible and they take a proposal. We sealed boards to the seat rather than to the person, so the work passes to whoever takes it up next.

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argued that digital systems lost the human virtue of forgetting, and that some forgetting has to be designed back in.⁴ We agree, with a limit. What was decided, and by whom, isn't forgotten, because a self-managing organisation depends on people being able to see how it got here. What's about people who aren't part of it, once the work with them is done, is let go.

What's still uncertain is real. The trail is append-only, and a person's right to have their data erased sits awkwardly with a record that doesn't change. We've designed the answer, keeping personal details apart from the record of what happened so they can go while the fact of it stays, and we've built parts of it, but not all. Duties that differ by country we've designed to be met through each organisation's legal wrapper, and that isn't built. The check that keeps outsiders' details out of playbooks reads names, addresses and numbers; it will miss things written in other ways. Documents keep sixty versions, not every one. And we're still working out how something said in one person's conversation should rise into what the whole organisation keeps, beyond Wise-Eye's judgement about what was said and what was decided. For now, that judgement, and the undo beside everything it files, is what stands between them.

What you might take from this

The question isn't how much an organisation remembers. It's whose memory each thing is, and where it lives. Write what the work needs as the work happens, where everyone can read it. Seal what's about a person to that person. Let go of what nobody needs to keep.

What's known is shared, what's personal is sealed, and some things are never kept.

Notes and further reading

Chapter 24. Birth, division and death

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 organisations avoid endings, and what hidden endings cost the business and its people
• How an organisation begins, and why a starter pack describes but creates nothing
• How branches are born, split and folded, with nothing dropped when one ends
• How people leave or step down, and how locks protect value and those who depend on it
• Where whole organisations dividing, joining and closing begins, in the next chapter

There's a belief so deep in organisational life that it rarely gets said out loud. A good organisation lasts for ever.

The sceptic holds it without needing to defend it. Growth is success. Splitting means something went wrong: a falling out, a failed merger, a team that couldn't get on. Closing is the worst failure of all. And whenever a part of an organisation ends, or a person leaves, someone loses. Their job, their standing, the thing they built. So the sensible move is to keep everything going for as long as possible, and to treat every ending as damage to be limited.

It's a fair belief, and it has history behind it. Endings in most organisations really are painful, and the people who carry the pain are rarely the ones who decided. If every ending is a loss, avoiding them looks like kindness.

This chapter opens the last part of the book, which looks beyond a single organisation. It starts with the edges of one: how an organisation on The Grove begins, how its parts divide and end, how a person leaves, and where whole organisations dividing, joining and closing begins, which the next chapter takes up.

What avoiding endings costs

Watch what organisations do instead of ending things.

A team that has done its job isn't closed. It's kept on a budget line, given a new name, handed a vague remit, and slowly starved. A department that has grown into two different kinds of work isn't divided by the people in it. It's restructured from above, usually in one go, usually after years of strain. A project everyone knows is finished stays open because closing it would mean admitting it's finished. And when the money tightens, the ending that was avoided for years arrives all at once, as layoffs: decided in a small room, announced on a Tuesday, carried out by people who had no say.

The business cost is drag. Effort goes into keeping alive what no longer earns its place, while new work waits for a home. The organisation carries its own dead weight, and the people inside can feel it.

The human cost is worse. When endings are hidden, they can't be fair. Nobody plans a landing for the people affected, because nobody admitted there would be an ending. The person whose role disappears in a restructure finds out with everyone else. The knowledge in a closed team scatters. And the lesson people learn is that ending is something done to you, never something you take part in.

The writer Arie de Geus spent years at Shell studying why a few companies live for centuries while most die young.¹ What struck him was that the long-lived ones behaved like living things: they paid attention to their surroundings, let parts of themselves change, and were tolerant of activity at the edges. They didn't survive by refusing to change shape. They survived by being willing to change it. William Bridges, writing about change in organisations, made a related point from the human side: every transition begins with an ending, and organisations that skip the ending get stuck in the middle.²

Endings as part of life

Chapter 5 asked what changes if an organisation is alive rather than a machine, and one answer was that living things are born, split, merge and die, and none of that is failure. This chapter is where that picture has to show it can carry weight. If endings are part of life, then the questions change. Not "how do we avoid this?" but "who decides it, and who is looked after when it happens?"

Barbara Marx Hubbard, whose picture of humanity as one organism being born runs underneath much of this book, read crises as birth pangs: real and painful, and a sign of something trying to come through rather than of the end. A split can be read the same way. Two streams of work pulling apart is often an organisation outgrowing a single shape, and the question is whether that birth is attended in the open or left to happen in the dark.

Beginning

An organisation on The Grove begins with one person. They give it a name, of sixty characters at most, and a purpose. By founding it they agree to the organisation's first version of how its people are here together, which they and later members can rewrite. They hold the root, the branch that holds the purpose and everything that hasn't found a home yet. In the first hour, Wise-Eye can help them draft a starter pack: the branches they mean to have, how the work runs, what they'll keep and watch. The pack describes. It doesn't create anything. A branch in it is a branch they intend, not one that exists.

That small detail matters for everything after. Nothing comes into being in an organisation on The Grove by being written into a plan. It comes into being by a decision someone can see.

Division inside one organisation

Inside an organisation, the life of branches is built, and it runs through ordinary proposals.

A new branch is born by a proposal heard in the forum around the branch it grows from. It can start from nothing, or it can carry jobs out of its parent, taking their work and records with it. One job that has become two can be split into two. A job can move to another branch where that work already lives. And a branch can be folded back into its parent.

Folding is how a branch ends, and it's worth being exact about what happens, because this is where most organisations lose things. When a fold is agreed in the forum around the parent, everything the branch answered for goes up to the parent, with its open work, its records, its domains and their connections, its playbooks and its measures. Where the parent already answers for the same job, the work joins the parent's own, so nothing is held twice. The promises it was keeping go up too, along with what it holds, money owed to it, sendings under way and the bets it had placed. What's left of its budget goes with its work. Any branch beneath it now grows under the parent. Practices that held only on that branch end, each one saying why. An open seat it had posted closes. Its holders step down. Then the branch is composted. Its name stays in the record, so the history can still say where things were.

Nothing is dropped on the floor. The work doesn't end because the branch did. It moves to where it can still be done.

The organisation's reading, described in Chapter 19, can show that a branch may be withering, or that two branches pass work back and forth so much they may want to be one. The reading never acts on that. A person raises the proposal, and the forum decides. And quiet alone is never read as dying, because some parts of an organisation are meant to be quiet.

Leaving

For a person, the edge is simpler. Anyone can leave, at any time, with nobody's permission. Chapter 10 described what that means: off every seat, the work in your hands back to its branch, your record kept, no share of what the organisation holds, and a door left open to be invited back.

Stepping down from a seat without leaving is gentler still. You give notice, up to sixty days, and the seat stays yours through it. A shared seat carries on with the others. A seat that empties falls to the branch above, which holds it meanwhile, so the work isn't orphaned. When the root's last holder leaves, it passes to the holders of the branches just beneath it, or else to whoever has been a member longest. That rule is still provisional.

There are two places where the door narrows, and both are honest. The last member can't leave, because that wouldn't be leaving; it would be closing the organisation. And nobody can step down from the last seat anyone holds, because that would leave an organisation where nobody could decide anything. Both are refusals to strand the organisation, not to hold the person.

Exit costs nothing, and that's deliberate. Albert Hirschman called exit and voice the two ways people respond when an organisation declines: they speak up, or they go.³ Where voice is wide and exit is free, a person's leaving is information, not betrayal.

Who is looked after

The fear behind the sceptic's belief is that when something ends, someone loses. Two locks, described in Chapter 17, are where that fear is met.

The first protects value. A thing held to the organisation's purpose can never be sold, given away, scrapped or written off, even if every member agrees. It can move between branches, still locked. So when a branch is folded, what it held to the purpose goes up with it, still locked. An ending can't become a way of quietly stripping the organisation.

The second protects people. Anyone can say they depend on something the organisation holds: a home, a tool they earn their living with, a supply, a way in. That entry stands in the open. A proposal to dispose of the thing can't conclude unless it says, for every person listed, how what they rely on will land. The entry survives even if they leave the organisation, because leaving doesn't stop someone needing the roof over their head. The system checks that every landing is there. Whether a landing is good enough is for the forum and the people who depend on it.

That's the difference from a layoff. The ending is decided in the open, by the people who carry the work, and nothing a person depends on can be taken away without a written answer to "and what happens to them?"

Beyond one organisation

Everything above, inside one organisation, is built. Whole organisations changing shape is designed and not yet built, and it has to be before The Grove goes live: one organisation becoming two, a part budding off to become its own, two organisations joining, and an organisation closing in good order. Chapter 25 tells how, in the words of living cells, and the one rule under all of it: nothing separates or joins until everything it touches has somewhere to land.

How we decided

We began with the word "fork", borrowed from software, where anyone can copy the code and go their own way. In September 2026 we retired it, because it bundled two different acts. Copying the pattern of an organisation takes nothing from anyone. Dividing what it holds takes a great deal. Treating them as one made both harder to think about.

The biggest choice was to drop a right we'd first given groups: a faction could leave an organisation and take a fair share of its money with it, without the others agreeing. It looked like protection against capture. We judged it would invite the opposite: join, split, walk off with a slice. So only a person's exit is unconditional, and dividing what's shared needs consent. We accepted a real cost. In an organisation that has genuinely been captured, the good people can leave with their identity and record, but not with a share of what they built. The purpose lock still stops anyone draining it.

The fold was built later than the rest. Simulated organisations showed the reading could say a branch wanted to merge or was withering, and nothing could act on it; the work was moved by hand and an empty branch was left behind. A fold that carries everything in one change was the answer.

We decided never to suggest merging two branches because the same people hold both. And we decided to treat a division as a passage people grieve through, not only a mechanism.

What's still open here is whether, once real organisations use the fold, it will feel like a fair ending or a tidy one.

What you might take from this

Organisations avoid endings because their endings are usually unfair: decided out of sight, landed on people who had no say. Make endings ordinary decisions, made in the open by the people who carry the work, with the work carried on and every person who depends on something given a written landing, and they stop being failure. They become the organisation changing shape, the way living things do.

An ending decided in the open, with a landing for everyone it touches, is a healthy part of an organisation's life.

Notes and further reading

On the life cycle of organisations, from birth through growth to decline and renewal: Adizes, I. (1988), Corporate Lifecycles: How and Why Corporations Grow and Die and What to Do About It, Prentice Hall. On seeing organisations as living systems rather than machines: Morgan, G. (1986), Images of Organization, Sage. On crises read as birth pangs rather than endings: Hubbard, B. M. (1998), Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential, New World Library.

Chapter 25. Dividing and joining

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 mergers and splits so often go wrong, and what it costs the business and its people
• Why we borrowed the words, and the order of things, from living cells
• How a whole organisation becomes two, how a part buds off, and how a branch is copied to be compared
• How organisations join: staying two, taking one in, or becoming something new
• How an organisation closes in good order, with everything it held handed on
• The one rule under all of them, and why this has to be built before The Grove goes live

Ask anyone who has lived through a merger and they'll tell you how it went. It was announced, not decided. The two cultures were going to come together, and instead one swallowed the other. Half the systems never talked to each other. The people who knew how things worked left in the first year, and the customers noticed before the board did.

Splits go the same way, only louder. A partnership that has grown apart becomes a fight over the client list. A department spun out as its own company finds out, on day one, that nobody decided who owns the website, the van or the contract with its biggest customer.

The sceptic's view is simple: an organisation is one thing, and changing what it is, by halving it or adding to it, is always a wrench. The damage can be managed, never avoided.

Chapter 24 showed how branches inside one organisation are born, split and folded, with nothing dropped. This chapter goes a level up, to whole organisations: how one becomes two, how a part leaves to become its own, how two come together, and how one closes. It's the part of the design we most need to get right, and none of it is built yet. It has to be before The Grove goes live.

What the usual ways cost

The numbers are hard to argue with. Clayton Christensen and his colleagues, writing in 2011, put the failure rate of mergers and acquisitions at between seven and nine in every ten, on more than $2 trillion a year.¹ Most of that money is spent buying something and then losing what made it worth buying.

The reasons are familiar. A merger is decided by a few people, in private, and then done to everyone else. It happens in one go: on a set day the two become one, ready or not. What can't be joined cleanly is joined anyway, or left hanging. And whose way wins is settled by who paid.

A split costs in the same places. The work that sat between the two halves, the customer both served, the shared supplier, the knowledge in one person's head, has nowhere to go. People are sorted into sides rather than choosing. And because the parting is usually a falling out, every shared thing becomes a prize.

The business pays in what leaks away: customers, know-how, months of drift. People pay in uncertainty. For a long stretch nobody knows which side they're on, who they answer to, or whether their work will still exist.

Borrowing from the cell

Living things divide and join all the time, and they rarely get it wrong. A cell about to divide doesn't cut itself in half and hope. It copies its whole genome first, so each daughter gets a complete set. It holds the two copies side by side inside one membrane. And it won't separate until every chromosome is attached to the fibres that will pull it to one side or the other. Biologists call that wait the spindle checkpoint: a single unattached chromosome is enough to hold the whole division.² Only when everything is attached does the cell pinch in two.

Joining has its biology too. Lynn Margulis argued in 1967, against the opinion of her time, that the mitochondria inside our cells were once free-living bacteria taken in by another cell, and that they still carry DNA of their own.³ Her paper was turned down by around fifteen journals before it was published. It's now the textbook account.

So we've taken our words for these changes from biology, and more than the words: the order of things. Copy the whole pattern before dividing anything. Hold the two side by side before they part. Attach everything before anything separates. The words are less familiar than "split" and "merge", but each one says exactly what happens, and none of them sounds like a fight.

Making more

Cell division: one organisation becomes two

An organisation that has grown into two different things can become two whole organisations. Neither is the original, and neither is the leftover. It runs as a cell's division does.

Ready first. There has to be enough for two: enough people for each side's forums to be real, enough work for each to live on, enough money to begin.

The pattern copied whole to both. Each organisation's DNA, its purpose, its branches and its practices, is copied in full to each side, never split down the middle. Each changes itself afterwards, in its own forums, as it chooses.

The sisters, inside one membrane. Before anything separates, the two organisations-to-be live side by side inside the one that's dividing. Each seat is doubled, held by two people, one for each sister. The two in a pair are always two different people. Someone can hold seats on both sides afterwards, but never both halves of one pair, or nothing would have divided. For a while it's still one organisation, with two of everything beginning to work apart. The sisters stay together until every landing is in place, the legal ones included. Up to the moment of separation, it can be called off: one of each pair steps down, and it's one organisation again.

Everything attached before anything separates. This is the checkpoint, and it's all or nothing. Two kinds of attachment are needed. The first is inside: each person in a pair goes with one side; each asset, document, budget, domain and piece of work in hand goes to one side or is copied to both. The second is outside: each customer, supplier, agreement and organisation it deals with is attached to one daughter or both, and told; the front desk, the way in for anyone writing to the organisation, knows where to send them. If one thing inside has no landing, the whole division waits for it.

But nobody outside can hold it hostage. A supplier, a bank or a customer has to agree before an agreement with them moves, and the organisation can't make them. So each outside relationship has a date by which it lands: as the other party agrees, or, if they refuse or stay quiet, with the side that keeps the legal company, since that's who the contract is with. That side can then serve the other by an agreement of their own, or the contract ends where its own terms allow. One silent supplier can't stop a division, or bargain for a better deal by threatening to.

Separation, at once. When everything is attached, one sister moves into a space of its own, with its own front desk and, where it needs one, its own legal form. It's the one step that can't be undone, so it comes last. And it's the first day in law too. The slow legal work, forming the new company, opening its bank account, getting the consents, moving people's employment, is done while the sisters are still together, and the separation happens on the day it completes. Anything still trailing after that is carried by an agreement between the two, never by staying joined.

The body shared roughly, the pattern exactly. Some things copy freely: documents, practices, know-how, the history in the books. Some divide: money, stock, budgets. And some can't be either: a building, a van, a bank account, a web address, the legal company. Each of those goes to one side, with the other getting a settlement, a new one of its own, or shared use by agreement. The legal company is one of them. Both daughters are equally legitimate on The Grove, but in law one company carries on and the other side forms a new one, and the proposal says which. Making both new would mean winding a company up, paying the tax that can bring, and registering everything again. Money and things follow the work that needs them, guided by who has said they depend on what, as Chapter 17 describes.

Neither sister is weaker. Trust is earned in a context, so it can't simply be copied. But a daughter that started with none would have forums with no weight on its first day. So each starts at full weight, from the history the two shared. Among the people who go to each side, the trust they gave each other carries over. What was given to someone now on the other side falls away, and the rest is scaled back up to make a whole. From then on, each grows its own.

Throughout, the organisation stays whole to everyone outside it. Anyone writing in is answered all the way through. And the keys to its outside accounts never leave the operating system's hands: the division happens on the operating system, so they move from one sister's space to the other's without a person ever holding them.

Budding: a part becomes its own

Sometimes it isn't the whole organisation that has grown in two directions, but one part of it. The marketing branch has become a marketing company in all but name. Yeast and hydra reproduce this way: a small copy grows on the side of the parent and pinches off, and the parent carries on as itself.

Budding follows the same steps, for the part. The bud carries the whole DNA, so it starts as a complete organisation rather than a fragment. Only its own seats are doubled, and only where the parent still needs that work done; one of each pair stays to hold it at home. Its people, things and relationships are attached as in a division. And usually there's one new attachment too: an agreement by which the new organisation goes on serving the one it came from. The parent keeps its legal identity and its name.

Budding is also the easiest way to walk off with value: set up the new organisation, take its seats, and send it more than its share. So it carries its own guards. Anyone who will decide who holds a seat in the new organisation stands aside from deciding the bud. A bud carrying more than the organisation counts as material takes the high-impact clocks and the waiting period. And what went, and to whom, is on the record for everyone to see.

Gene duplication: a copy to compare

The smallest way of making more doesn't create a new organisation at all. A branch is copied inside the organisation, and the copy is meant to differ. It's a twin with a hypothesis: two ways of doing the same work, run side by side, judged by a measure the people proposing it set themselves, with a date to look back.

Genes are copied the same way, and biologists have long watched what becomes of the copies.^{4 5} Most often one is lost. Sometimes one takes on a new job. Sometimes the two share out the old job between them. Twins on The Grove end in the same three ways. One is folded into the other, and what it learned goes with it. One becomes a branch with work of its own. Or the two divide the old work, a region each, say. A twin's people are its own, and its seats aren't doubled; a pair of the same people on both would undo the comparison.

Joining

Joining is division run backwards, with one difference: there are two organisations, so both have to want it. Each raises and decides it at its own root. Neither can be joined against its will.

The two patterns have to fit, too. Anything either organisation holds locked to its purpose can join only where the new arrangement honours that lock, so a merger can't become a way of quietly freeing what was locked. And wherever two of a thing meet, two marketing branches, two sets of books, two front desks, they're held side by side as sisters for a while before they become one. Where joining costs someone their seat, they're one of those it affects: they're asked, they can raise a concern, and the floor beneath every member still holds them.

There are four ways to join, from the lightest to the deepest.

Symbiosis: staying two. The organisations stay separate, bound by agreements: services one offers the other, needs one answers, promises kept between them. Lichen is a fungus and an alga living as one without either ceasing to be itself. This is the common case, and it's built: it's how organisations on The Grove work together today, as Chapter 26 describes.

Endosymbiosis: taking one in. One organisation takes the other in as a part that keeps a life of its own, as the mitochondria in our cells keep their own DNA. It becomes a branch, with its own purpose and practices, inside the larger whole.

The biology fits a little too well, so it's said plainly before anyone consents. A mitochondrion can't go back to living alone, and a branch can't leave on its own either: branches aren't sovereign. The organisation that's taken in gives up its say over its own purpose and over whether it leaves. The way back out is budding, decided in the forum it will sit in. The proposal sets this out in three parts, as an export does: if you do this, this is what happens; this is what you give up after; this is what protects you before.

Fusion: becoming something new. Two patterns combine into a new one, and neither wins. A new purpose is drafted together, by people from both, and then approved by each organisation in its own forums. If they can't agree a purpose, they don't fuse. They can still live in symbiosis.

Grafting: a part of one joined to another. One organisation lets a part of itself go, and another takes it in: one organisation selling its marketing to another, say. It's budding and joining in one act. The first decides at its root to let the part go, attaching its people, things and relationships as in budding. The second decides where it lands, in the forum of the branch it will grow from, as any new branch is heard. It carries the same guards as budding. The operating system gives the mechanics, never the terms. What's paid is between the two organisations. People always choose whether to go, as anyone can always leave, and those who go are welcomed into the second organisation, their seats decided in its forum.

Earlier designs had a fifth way, federating: a new shared root above two organisations that each kept running themselves. We've let it go. With each organisation running in its own space, and no separate network holding data of its own, a shared root turns out to be either a fusion or a set of agreements.

Ending

Apoptosis: closing in good order

Some organisations finish. Their purpose is met, or the world no longer needs what they do. Cells have a way of ending that's part of being healthy, not a failure of it. In 1972 three pathologists named it apoptosis, from the Greek for leaves falling from a tree.⁶ A cell that ends this way doesn't burst. It packages itself into small parcels, and its neighbours take them in.

An organisation can close the same way. It's decided at the root, as a high-impact change with the waiting period, and, as with an export, everyone is asked and anyone can raise a concern. Every landing is set out first. Each member knows where they stand. Each customer and agreement is handed on or ended, and told. Each debt is paid and each promise kept or released. Each thing the organisation holds is sold, given or handed on. And anything locked to its purpose goes to another organisation whose purpose honours the lock, never sold off for whoever is left, much as a UK community interest company's remaining assets must go to another body with an asset lock.⁷ Then it winds down, the legal company is wound up, and the record is kept where its members can still reach it.

This has to be built before go-live too, as Chapter 18 says: a company carries on until someone winds it up, so The Grove needs a step that does.

One rule for all of them

Under all of these there's one rule.

Nothing separates or joins until every part has somewhere to go and every relationship somewhere to land. And wherever two of something meet, they're held side by side as sisters before they become one.

Each change is raised and decided at the root of every organisation it changes, by its forum, with the clocks and the waiting period that high-impact changes carry, and nobody can raise it alone or hurry it. Everyone it touches is asked and can raise a concern, and a concern is met by changing the plan. A twin, which changes only one branch, is decided in the forum of the branch it grows from.

None of it can be forced. Nobody can make an organisation divide, and nobody can make one join. If a division can't be agreed, it lapses, and the people stay responsible for what follows. Only as a last resort, where the forum is evenly split and leaving it half done would itself do harm, would a jury drawn at random rule on whether an objection is legitimate, never on who's right.

And the work, the people and the relationships are the point, not the spoils. A division says these streams of work have grown apart. It isn't two teams dividing what's left. People aren't assigned to a side. They choose, and they can hold seats on both.

How this differs from leaving

All of these happen on the operating system. An organisation that divides or joins stays inside it, under its forums, clocks and locks, and its keys stay where the system keeps them.

Leaving the operating system altogether is a different act: an export, the organisation taking everything it owns as a file, to a platform nobody knows. Chapter 27 describes it. The two share the same care. In both, nothing goes until everything and everyone it touches has a landing written down.

How we decided

We began with the word "fork", borrowed from software, and retired it in September 2026, as Chapter 24 tells. Its replacements, "divide", "spin off" and "merge", were accurate, but they sounded like what the sceptic fears. "Divide" sounds like a split down the middle, with someone getting the smaller half. So we went to biology for words that say exactly what happens, and found they brought the order of things with them.

The checkpoint was the biggest choice. Most splits and mergers go wrong at the edges: the customer nobody told, the contract nobody moved, the account one person held the password to. Making the whole change wait until every one of those has a landing is slower. It also means nobody discovers on day one that something was forgotten.

We chose the sisters, two of each seat inside one organisation, over the quicker way of copying everything at once and letting the duplicates step down. In a copy, the same people would decide for both sides, and nothing would make the stepping down happen. With the sisters, the two sides begin to work apart while they're still one, and the division can still be called off.

We decided that nobody outside could hold a division hostage. All or nothing is right for what the organisation can settle itself. Applied to people it can't make agree, it would hand any one of them a veto, so outside relationships land by a date instead.

We decided neither sister would start weaker, and that one would keep the legal company. Both are meant to be whole organisations from the first day. In law, though, the cheapest and cleanest way is for one company to carry on, so that's treated like the van: one side takes it.

We kept the operating system out of the terms. When one organisation sells a part to another, what it's worth is for them, and whether to go is for each person. The system makes sure nothing is dropped and nothing locked is freed. It doesn't set the price.

The biology stays in the book, where it explains. In the app the words are plain: "Split into two", "Spin off", "Try another way", "Work together", "Join them as a branch", "Become one", "Hand over to another organisation", "Close".

What's still open is less than it was, but real. How twins sit beside the bets of Chapter 14. Whether an organisation can pause, lying dormant rather than closing. How closing works when an organisation can't pay what it owes, which needs the law worked out first. And how all of this feels to the people living through it, which no design can answer before it's tried.

What you might take from this

Mergers and splits go wrong when they're decided out of sight, done in one go, and finished before everything has somewhere to go. A cell does the opposite. It copies the whole pattern first, holds the two side by side, and waits until every last part is attached before it parts. And when its time comes, it ends in good order, handing on what it held.

An organisation can change what it is without a wrench, if nothing separates or joins until everything it touches has somewhere to land.

Notes and further reading

On how cells and organisms came to live inside one another: Margulis, L. and Sagan, D. (1986), Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution, Summit Books.

Chapter 26. Between organisations

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 contracts forget and platforms own the memory, and what cooperation needs instead
• How services, needs and agreements work between organisations on The Grove today
• What crosses between two organisations, what each can see, and how agreements are looked back on
• How people who belong to more than one organisation count, and the open question that raises
• What's decided but not built, including conditional pledges against the race to the bottom

A sceptic who has come this far might grant us something. Perhaps inside one organisation, people who can see each other can decide by consent, keep their promises without a boss and agree to hold back together. Fine. But step outside the walls and the weather changes.

Between organisations there's no shared purpose and no forum. There are contracts, written by whoever has the better lawyers. There's leverage: the big buyer squeezes the small supplier, and the platform squeezes everyone. And there's the race from Chapter 1, each organisation cutting the corner because it knows the others will. Cooperation is lovely in a circle, the doubt goes. Between organisations, competition wins, and the biggest wins most.

It's a fair doubt, and this chapter won't pretend to dissolve it. It says what exists today between organisations on The Grove, what we've decided and not yet built, and where the promise Chapter 1 made is still mostly a promise.

What the usual ways cost

A contract is a promise designed to fail safely. It imagines the relationship going wrong and prices that in advance. The effort goes into the clauses, and the clauses are drafted by the side with more to spend, so small suppliers sign what they're given. Then the contract goes in a drawer. What was agreed drifts away from what's actually happening, and nobody looks again until the renewal or the dispute. The person at the supplier who can see the arrangement isn't working has no way to say so, short of a call to the account manager that nobody wants to make.

Platform marketplaces solved the finding, and charged for it. The platform stands between buyer and seller, takes a cut of every exchange, owns the ranking and owns the reviews. Stars drift upward until four point eight means "fine". They get traded and gamed, and they say very little: four stars from whom, for what? The relationship belongs to the platform. Leave, and your reputation stays behind. The platform is in its own race, for attention and margin, and the organisations on it are its stock.

Underneath both sits the race to the bottom. The political scientist Robert Axelrod ran tournaments in which computer programs played the prisoner's dilemma against each other, again and again.¹ The winner was the simplest: cooperate first, then do whatever the other did last time. What made cooperation pay wasn't goodwill. It was three conditions: the players met again, they could see what the other had done, and they remembered. Elinor Ostrom found something similar in the commons she studied: people who could see each other, and made their own rules, could hold back together for centuries.²

Contracts and platforms supply those conditions badly. A contract meets once and then forgets. A platform remembers, but the memory is a number it owns.

Relationships that are seen and looked back on

The turn, for us, was to treat what passes between organisations as a relationship that both sides decided, that each can see, and that gets looked back on, rather than a transaction that's priced and forgotten. Axelrod's three conditions are things an operating system can provide: meeting again, through standing agreements; seeing, through what each side is shown; memory, through the look back. And each organisation stays sovereign. Nobody owns anybody.

What exists today has three pieces: services, needs and agreements. They were built in late October 2026.

A service is something one part of an organisation offers to others. A branch says what it does in its own words, which of its jobs it draws on, and its price, which can be nothing. It chooses who can see it: everyone, listed in the directory, or only the organisations it names. Offering a service is a proposal heard in that branch's own forum, the same way it would change how it works. Requests then reach it through its way in and land as that branch's own work.

A need goes the other way. A branch posts what it's short of, "deliveries across town, about twenty a week", to everyone or to named organisations. Those who could meet it see it and offer one of their services.

Finding someone starts from what you're looking for, in your own words. What comes back is ordered nearest first: organisations you already exchange work or money with, then ones your own people belong to, then everyone else who lists the service. "Two of your people belong there" counts for more than anything a stranger says about itself. Wise-Eye can search for a service and draft a need, but a person reads the draft and posts it.

An agreement takes two proposals, one in each organisation. On the side bringing the service in, it's heard in the forum around the parent of the branch it will serve, as a change to a seat would be. That's deliberate: an outside organisation serving one of a branch's jobs changes who carries the work, so it's decided where seats are decided. The proposal names the provider, which job it serves, which kinds of work it covers, the fee, how the two will work together, how often it's looked back on (every ninety days unless the forum chooses otherwise, anywhere from a week to a year) and what would show it worked. Once it passes, a piece of work lands on the provider's branch: this organisation asks to use your service. That branch's people agree by a proposal, or say no. Nothing starts until both have decided.

The line we hold here is simple. Bringing in a service changes who does the work, not who answers for it. The job stays with the branch that holds it. The provider gets no seat and no say in what's decided, only what the agreement opens to it.

What crosses the membrane

Once an agreement is live, whoever holds the branch, or has a piece of work in hand, can pass work under that job to the provider. What crosses is the work's title, the note written with it and its day. Nothing else of the organisation goes with it. On the provider's side it arrives as their own work, marked as from the other organisation, and if it has a day, it carries a promise to keep by then (Chapter 15 follows how promises are tracked).

When they finish, it comes back with their words and anything they attached. It goes back to the branch open, to be looked at before anything goes out, and it never closes by itself. If they close it without doing it, it comes back saying so.

It's tempting to picture this as one organisation calling another's system, the way a connector reaches a mailbox. Today it isn't that. On today's test bench every organisation lives in the same space, so passing work under an agreement needs no key and no relay: the system writes a new piece of work straight onto the provider's branch, carrying only the title, the note and the day, and it comes in through that organisation's own one door, to the job the service draws on, or to be read for where it belongs if none fits. A service isn't a connector, and nothing between organisations is built as one. The way in is the only interface an agreement names that carries anything. A direct call through the API is designed, and can be written into an agreement, but nothing acts on it yet. How organisations will reach each other once each is its own DAO in its own space, as they will be when The Grove goes live, is still open.

Each side also holds a standing promise about the agreement itself, due on its look back day, and like any promise it rises if the day passes with nobody keeping it. At that day, or when the agreement ends, the branch that used the service answers three things: did it land (yes, partly, no), would you keep it (keep, change, stop), and a line in its own words. The facts come with it, in words: how many pieces of work went through, how many came back by their day. The provider sees every look back and can answer under one.

Someone weighing that service later reads it plainly: "Four organisations have used it. Three kept it on. What they said, newest first." There's no score and no average. Only a branch that held an agreement can look back on it, so nobody judges what they didn't use. Either side can end the agreement on the terms agreed.

What each side can see

An agreement can be read only by its two organisations. To each other, they appear by name; branches, members and purpose stay inside.

From where you stand, the network shows the organisations you belong to and the services between them and others: who has whom do what, for which job, the fee, how they work together and when it's next looked back on. It doesn't show the work passing along an agreement, or letters, or money. Who works with whom is public by default, because seeing who your neighbours trust is part of how trust travels. But either side can keep an agreement to themselves, and then it's drawn only for people who belong to both. Branch names appear only for organisations you're part of.

Two more lines hold throughout. Everything is organisation to organisation: a freelancer is a one-person organisation, and a need is answered by an organisation, never by a person directly. And the Steward, the organisation that looks after the network's shared code, takes no fee on anything that passes between organisations. When one organisation provides a service to another, what it earns is its own.

People who belong to more than one

A person has one identity and can belong to many organisations. Their face and name travel with them; their seats, their trust and their voice belong to each organisation separately. Belonging to two gives no say in the second because of what you hold in the first.

Their belonging does count for nearness. When a search says two of your people belong somewhere, that's where it comes from. And if you belong to both ends of an agreement, you see it even when they've kept it private.

There's an open question here we haven't settled. Inside one organisation, the person a seat change would seat stands aside from deciding it. Between organisations, nothing yet asks someone who holds seats in both to stand aside when their forum decides an agreement with the other. Whether it should, and where the line would sit, is still to decide.

What's decided but not built

Some of what an agreement can name is recorded but not yet acted on. A feed of data going out, the provider calling in directly, one area of the organisation handed across for the provider to act in and taken back at any time, the mood of a room read across the boundary as a whole: an agreement can list these, and today only the way in carries work. Paying each bill as routine once the fee is agreed is designed and not yet joined up. So is publishing services in shared vocabularies, so that systems outside The Grove can find them.

The larger gap is the one Chapter 1 named. Two organisations committing to each other is useful. It isn't an answer to the race to the bottom. The race needs many organisations to commit together, and to do it without anyone moving first alone.

The shape of that answer has been around for a while. The campaigner John Bunzl's Simultaneous Policy, SIMPOL, asks people to support a set of global policies that come into force only when enough nations adopt them at once, so no country loses by going first.³ The economist Alex Tabarrok described the dominant assurance contract: pledges that pay out only if enough people pledge, with the organiser compensating pledgers if the threshold isn't reached, so pledging becomes the sensible move whatever others do.⁴

We're building towards something like this, and call it a conditional pledge, though it's an intention more than a design so far: an organisation commits to act, to pay a living wage, to stop a harmful practice, to cut what it burns, only when enough others commit too, and when the threshold is met they switch on together. We've parked it. The questions it raises are real and unanswered: which forum inside an organisation can make a pledge that binds the whole, what counts as enough, how a pledge is seen to be kept without organisations policing each other, and what happens to one that switches on and then backs away. A map of the network beyond your own neighbourhood is parked with it.

So the honest position is this. What exists is the ground two organisations stand on together: decided on both sides' authority, seen, remembered and looked back on. The many committing together is still to build.

How we decided

We weighed a contract as a document, signed and filed. We chose a standing promise both sides decide by proposal and revisit on a rhythm, because the drawer is where contracts go wrong.

We weighed ratings. Someone choosing a provider genuinely wants to know how it went for others, and a star rating is the familiar answer. We chose the look back in words instead, because a number set by hand is exactly what's refused everywhere else in an organisation on The Grove, and because averages hide who said what.

We weighed letting people hire people across the boundary. We chose organisation to organisation, so the question of whose authority stands behind an agreement has the same answer on both sides: a forum's.

We weighed a network that drew all the traffic between organisations. We chose services only, because the work passing between two organisations is theirs, not the neighbourhood's.

We parked conditional pledges, not because they matter less, but because they rest on the simpler thing working first. A pledge between many is only as good as the agreements between two.

Some of this we're unsure about. Nearest first favours those you already know, and that can quietly become the old pattern, where whoever is established gets the work. We haven't yet seen whether the look back in words carries enough for a stranger choosing. And whether many organisations will bind themselves without someone at the centre holding the pledges is the question this chapter can't yet answer.

What you might take from this

Between organisations, the usual choice is a contract that forgets or a platform that owns the memory. An agreement between organisations on The Grove is decided by each side, seen by both, and looked back on in words, and either side can end it. That gives cooperation its three conditions: meeting again, seeing, remembering.

Organisations can already commit to each other in the open; what we're building towards is letting many of them switch on together, so nobody has to move first.

Notes and further reading

On how a conditional commitment changes the arithmetic of going first, Schelling, T. C. (1960), The Strategy of Conflict, Harvard University Press, remains a clear starting point. On co-creation, and gatherings that matched one group's needs with another's offers: Hubbard, B. M. (1998), Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential, New World Library.

Chapter 27. DNA, the network, and why not open source

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

• Where the code stands today, and what's still to be built before The Grove goes live
• What closed software and open source each cost an organisation trying to work without a boss
• Why an organisation's DNA is its own data, and the code only the ground it grows in
• How every organisation is designed to carry the operating system sealed, choose every change and leave with it
• Why we said no to open source for now, and what that answer still leaves open
• Why the guardrails are hard to remove from inside: roped together, by choice, with leaving always real

If you write code for a living, this is probably the question you've been holding since Chapter 6.

You say nobody should be the boss. You say an organisation should be able to leave. You say the operating system should be impossible to capture. Then open source it. Put the code where anyone can read it, copy it and run it, and the promises keep themselves. Anything less is a company asking to be trusted while it keeps the keys. We've all seen that film. The platform is friendly while it grows, and then the prices rise, the terms change, and the exit turns out to be a door painted on a wall.

It's a fair doubt, and we want to answer it properly. That starts with saying plainly where things stand.

Today, The Grove is a test bench. Its organisations are simulated, seeded, grown and run by AI people, while we test the design, the experience, scale and security. As the code stands, every organisation shares one space on the Internet Computer, and a new release reaches all of them at once. Each organisation's records are kept apart from every other's, and an upgrade carries them over without losing anything, but no organisation yet chooses whether to take it. Nothing described later in this chapter as carried, sealed or chosen exists yet. It's the shape The Grove goes live in: each organisation its own independent DAO, running its own copy of the operating system, with its own DNA growing in it.

We built it in that order on purpose. A network of organisations that can't yet run themselves would be worth nothing, and nobody would want to leave with it or fight to capture it. So we built the organisation first. What follows is the design for the rest, which we've decided and haven't built, and the reasons it isn't simply open source.

What both answers cost

Most software for organisations is closed and rented. The organisation doesn't hold it; it visits it. Its records, its history and the way its work is done live on someone else's machine, under terms they can change. Leaving means exporting what it's allowed to export and rebuilding the rest. For an organisation trying to work without a boss, that's an odd place to live. It has removed the boss from inside and accepted a landlord outside.

Open source answers part of that, and the part it answers is real. Eric Raymond's argument from the late 1990s still holds: when many people can read the code, problems surface faster and improvements come from places no single company would think to look.¹ Code anyone can read is code whose promises anyone can check.

But open source has costs of its own, and the people who know it best are the ones who talk about them most. Nadia Eghbal's study of how open projects are actually maintained found that most rest on a handful of tired people, carrying work that thousands depend on and almost nobody pays for.² Code that's free to copy isn't free to keep. And open code has repeatedly been taken by companies with more money than its makers, run as a service and sold back to the people who wrote it, with little returned.

There's a deeper problem, and it's the one that matters most here. Open source frees the code. It doesn't free the organisation. If an organisation's records live in a space someone else controls, being able to read the software running there doesn't get it out. It can fork the code. It can't fork its history, its agreements or its people unless they're already its own. What traps an organisation is rarely who can read the source. It's who holds the running thing.

The turn: what's yours and what's ground

So we started from a different question. Not who can read the code, but who can hold an organisation hostage, and how to arrange things so that nobody can.

The answer begins with a distinction we drew in Chapter 6. What makes an organisation that organisation isn't code. It's data: its purpose, its branches and what each answers for, its agreements, the playbook each piece of work follows, the shapes of the records it keeps, the decisions it has made and the record of how. We call this its DNA. It's written and changed by the people in the organisation, through the organisation's own proposals, and it belongs to them.

That part is built. Every organisation on The Grove holds its own DNA, kept apart from every other's, and when it describes itself in its first hour the result is its own pack, held at the root like its purpose. The code underneath is something else. It's the ground the DNA grows in: the means to run, and the few guardrails every organisation carries. We call the smallest core of it, the part nobody can vote away, the kernel.

Once you see the two apart, the design follows. The DNA has to be the organisation's, fully and always. The ground has to be something nobody can take away, including us.

What we're building towards

Here is the shape we've decided.

Every organisation will carry the operating system. Each will live in its own space, controlled by its own governance, not by us. Inside it, the organisation will carry everything it needs to keep living: its DNA, its members' records, its documents, and the operating system itself, running. It will also carry a sealed copy of the operating system's source, its history and its full design. The seal isn't held by us. It's a tiny companion space with no controller at all, which nobody can change, and which opens only on one condition we come to below. The organisation runs the operating system. It can't read the source until it has earned it.

That sealed copy matters more than it looks. If an organisation were given the source only when it left, a captured Steward could simply refuse to hand it over. So the copy travels from the first day, is refreshed with every release, and is never replaced, only added to. A Steward that slipped rubbish into one release would cost an organisation at most that release.

Nobody can push a change into an organisation. A new version arrives in the organisation's space, explained in its own terms: what changes for it, which of its own tensions it answers, and whether it touches a guardrail. Taking it is the organisation's own proposal, on the same clocks as any other high-impact change, with a pause in which a concern can stop it. An organisation can wait, skip a release, or go back to any earlier version it has carried. The archive of versions sits where running code can't reach it, and going back doesn't depend on the running code agreeing to its own removal: enough of the organisation's people, signing with their own keys, can do it from outside.

An organisation can leave. Its data is never locked in. The organisation can take its records, documents and agreements with it at any time, by its own proposal; no one person can take them on its behalf. Once it's established, with verified people holding its root and a record of work done over time, it can also detach from its network and keep running on its own, on the copy of the operating system it already carries, as it stood on the day it left. It needs no permission from outside to do so: not from the network, and not from the Steward. Inside, those who depend on what it holds are protected, as they are for anything locked to its purpose. That wait is there so that founding an organisation isn't a free way to walk off with a working copy. And when it agrees with another established organisation to form a network of their own, and to share one operating system from then on, they found a Steward of their own, with the operating system unlocked. From then on it's theirs to maintain and release as they choose.

The source opens when organisations form a network of their own. Two organisations that have each qualified, governed by different people, can draft a purpose for a new Steward together, pass it through each organisation's own governance, and wait out a cooling-off period. Then each one's seal checks the others and opens. From that moment they can read and change the code, and they become a network in their own right. A branch that splits off to become its own organisation takes a copy of the sealed code with it too.

This is what we mean by open to those who have earned it. Not open to anyone with a browser, and not closed to everyone but us. Open, fully, to organisations that have built something and have chosen to look after the operating system together.

The Steward is an organisation like any other. A network of organisations that recognise each other needs someone to maintain the code for it. That Steward will be an organisation on the same operating system, bound by the same rules, whose only difference is that it holds the source and ships releases. It earns its keep by being worth staying with. The Steward takes no fee from the services organisations provide to each other: what an organisation earns from its services is its own. An organisation pays it one flat plan for maintaining the operating system, never per person and never per decision, and is free to top up its own computing directly or bring its own key for AI, which keeps the plan honest.

The Steward becomes an organisation with seats, holding the code, from the day The Grove goes live. It has to: an operating system with no steward of its own would leave the code in one person's hands.

And if a Steward goes bad, the organisations leave together. Capturing a Steward gets the captor its business and nothing else. No keys to anyone's space, no only copy of anyone's records, no power to push code, no source held hostage, because every organisation already carries it. Bad code goes uninstalled. A price rise ends with organisations that stop paying. Neglect ends with organisations that pair up, open their seals and steward themselves.

What they do with the code after that is up to them. A new network can change anything, including the guardrails we hold most dear. We've accepted that. A system nobody can trap is one we can't control either. What we've designed is that a network which loosens a guardrail has to ship as a different lineage under a different name, so no organisation mistakes it for an update. Whether to make that a hard rule is still open.

I can't make anyone be good, and I'm not sure I'd trust anyone, myself included, to say for certain what good is. The guardrails are my best attempt, made with good intent. In five years we may find some of them were wrong. If that happens, the people who see it first need to be free to build something better without asking me.

How we decided

We weighed four answers.

Closed and rented was never on the table. It's the landlord we were trying not to become.

Open source, now, was the strongest alternative, and we took its case seriously. Its best arguments are these. Guardrails nobody can read are guardrails you're asked to believe, and Chapter 6 made the point that a promise in words is weaker than one in structure. Openness invites contribution and catches flaws faster. And a project that keeps its code close while talking about freedom looks like every company that later changed its licence.

We said no for now, for three reasons. The first is capture by money. An open kernel can be taken by anyone well funded, stripped of what makes it hard to boss people with, and offered under a similar name to organisations that can't tell the difference, while the Steward maintaining the real thing can't pay for its own work. The second is the safety of organisations' rules. The guardrails hold because no one inside an organisation can change them; a copy of the operating system that quietly drops one is a risk to every organisation that might run it without knowing. The third is the steward problem. Someone has to maintain the code, answer what organisations feel is missing and keep it secure, and Eghbal's tired maintainers are the warning. Open source doesn't remove that job. It only removes the way of paying for it.

There's one more reason, and it may be the deepest. People are elastic. An organisation can mean every word of its commitment to working without a boss and still drift back to the old shape the first time it's tired, frightened or short of money. Holacracy, sociocracy and Teal organisations have all met this wall, and so have decades of change programmes that held while someone was watching and quietly gave way when they stopped. What the heart wants and what a stressed group does are often two different things.

So we chose to make the guardrails hard to remove from inside. Not impossible: any organisation can leave, and organisations that have shown real commitment can form a network of their own, open the code, and change whatever they like. What they can't do is strip the guardrails out of The Grove while staying in it, or take The Grove down with them on the way out. Deviating is a choice, made in the open, with a cost. That's the whole of it.

This is closer to climbers roping up than to anyone being told what to do. Each chooses to tie in, knowing that on a hard day anyone can slip, and that the rope is what holds them when they do. Nobody ties anyone else in, and nobody stands above the rest holding the end. Binding yourself together, knowing what pressure can do, is a sovereign act, the kind Chapter 1 describes. And the rope is anchored as it goes, so one climber's fall doesn't pull the others off the face. That's also why leaving has to stay real: anyone can untie at a belay. If that ever became too hard in practice, the rope would become a leash.

And it cuts both ways. If we're wrong, and an organisation or a group of them can do this better without the guardrails, they're free to go and show it. We'd want to learn from them.

I'm not trying to be anyone's parent, and I'm prepared to be wrong. If you think you can do better, form your own network and go ahead. I'd honestly like to see it. What I'm asking for is that this has a fair chance first. We've spent decades talking about changing how we work, and millions on change that didn't hold, while most people go on working to live rather than living, wearing a mask from nine to five. People I know who reached the very top tell me it's uglier up there than most of us would believe. I don't think I'm anyone's saviour. But I think some of us have to give this a real shot, and give it the conditions it needs to survive our own worst days.

We also tried, for a while, a middle answer: source available only to a legitimate fork, released on request. It failed on the obvious test. If the Steward itself went bad, the organisations would be asking it for the way out. That was the moment we saw that the design had a hold in it as well as a hole, and that the only fix was for every organisation to carry the way out from the start.

Elinor Ostrom's work on commons helped us see the result as something other than closed.³ The commons she studied that lasted for centuries weren't open to everyone. They had clear edges, and the people inside them made their own rules. A bounded commons is a commons. We hold to that, though we know it's the argument a company keeping control would also make.

What we haven't answered yet is real. An organisation can't check sealed code before it unlocks it; published guardrails, their tests and verifiable builds help, but they aren't the same as reading it. Improvements will come more slowly than in an open bazaar, because organisations send tensions, not code. Whether an independent network can offer its changes back, and on what terms, isn't designed. The licence for unlocked source is still with lawyers, and licences that ask those who only take to pay, while those who contribute go free, are one lens we're looking through. The numbers for qualifying aren't set. Whether a network needs a code of conduct of its own, for how its organisations treat each other, isn't decided either. Running the same guardrails may be enough, though it guarantees less than it sounds: beyond the guardrails, each organisation decides how it behaves and can change its mind, because its commitments are its own to make. And until other stewards exist, leaving is possible but costly, so for now a fair price rests mostly on our own integrity, with open books as the check.

Dee Hock, who helped found Visa as an organisation held by its members, spent his later years warning that such networks drift back towards command and control.⁴ Visa became a conventional listed company in 2008. We read that as the strongest argument against us. Our answer is that recentralising is easiest where the centre holds what members need. We're designing a centre that holds nothing members can't leave with. Whether that's enough, we'll only know when someone tries to take it.

What you might take from this

Open source asks who can read the code. The harder question is who can hold an organisation, and the answer has to be nobody. Keep the organisation's DNA as its own data, let every organisation carry the operating system sealed inside its own space, let it choose every change, and let it walk away with everything when the network stops serving it.

The code doesn't need to belong to everyone if every organisation carries it and nobody can take it away.

Notes and further reading

On code as a kind of law, and why who writes it matters: Lessig, L. (1999), Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Basic Books.

Chapter 28. Growing a sustainable network

A working draft, November 2026. This book is being written while The Grove is being built; expect it to change. This chapter is a strawman: problems and candidate answers to argue with. None of it is built, and little of it is decided.

In this chapter

• Why attempts to build outside the money system tend to be owned, sold or closed
• Why the picture isn't a commune doing without, but a world better than ours: beauty, cities, technology
• What "sustainable" could mean for a network of organisations: three loops to close, and a test of what it could lose without collapsing
• How a first site might be funded with nothing, how surplus could seed the next, and how assets might stay in the commons
• Why the state's reach doesn't stop at the network's membrane, and why that argues for sharing rather than pricing
• What stays dependent on the outside world however large the network grows, and what we don't know

Every attempt to build a society outside the money system seems to end the same way. The founders own it, the next generation sells it, or the tax office closes it.

That's the doubt, and history gives it plenty of support. Communes have been bought out by their own members. Co-operatives have demutualised when the assets were worth more split than shared. Communities that hoped to leave money behind found the state still wanted its share, in its own currency. This chapter doesn't pretend to have solved any of that. It's a strawman: a set of problems we can see coming, with candidate answers to argue with.

The question

Chapter 30 pictures a society whose needs are met by many small organisations, owned by no one. Suppose a network of organisations on The Grove took that on as a shared purpose. Not a commune that drops out, but a growing web of self-managed organisations that together provide for people's needs, and that become steadily less dependent on the world outside.

How would it start, with no capital and no land? How would it keep what it builds from being sold? How far could it move away from outside money, and where would it stop?

Not a step back

When people hear this kind of thing, many picture a commune: a few dozen people in basic housing, growing vegetables and doing without. That isn't the picture.

The picture is beauty. Homes and buildings worth living in. Neighbourhoods, towns, and in time cities. The best of what technology can do, put to work for the people who live with it rather than for whoever owns it. Needing less outside money isn't the same as having less. A great deal of what makes ordinary life expensive today is rent paid to owners, interest paid to lenders and margins taken somewhere far away. Take those out, and the same effort goes much further.

So the aim isn't a smaller life, or a purer one. It's a better one: a world better than ours, not a compromise with it.

I don't see people doing without. I see beauty: places people are proud of, cities even, full of craft and technology, built by people who own what they build together. Not a retreat from the world we have, but something better than it.

What such a society would contain is for the people in it to work out. This chapter is about the frame: the mechanics that might let it begin and keep growing without being captured.

What sustainable could mean

Not total self-sufficiency. A society that makes everything itself is poorer and more brittle than one that trades, and even ecosystems exchange nutrients across their edges. The aim we're thinking about is to meet the essentials from within, trade the surplus by choice, and need a little less outside money every year.

For that to hold, three loops have to close.

Materials and energy. Inputs regenerate, soil, water, sun, rather than run down.

Capital. Assets fund the next assets without fresh outside debt.

People. Contribution doesn't burn people out, and the culture renews itself. This is the loop most intentional communities break on, more often than the money one.

There's a sharper way to put the goal. Self-sufficiency is about what you produce. Sovereignty, in the sense Chapter 1 gave it, is about whether you can walk away from a dependency without harm. The second is more achievable, and it gives the network a question it could ask itself continuously: what could we lose without collapsing? That's a gradient, not a finish line, and it suits a network that reads itself, as Chapter 2 hoped.

The more needs the network meets within, the fewer levers the outside world holds over it. That's close to arithmetic, with one caution: a single need that can't be met from within can still be lever enough.

Starting with nothing

At birth, someone holds the title, the keys and the signatures. That's the founding paradox: the thing meant to be ownerless starts out owned, or at least held in a few people's names.

The people who start it aren't necessarily the ones with the money, and they're often more than one. More often founders bring the energy: the idea, the first gathering, the will to keep going. Nor do they have to be the ones who hold the root, the seat that stewards the whole, once it's growing. The money can come from many places, outside and in. A bank or an ethical lender. Many small loans from supporters who believe in it, which is how many housing projects in Germany's Mietshäuser Syndikat, which comes up again below, are funded.¹ Community shares, where in the UK a co-operative or community benefit society can raise money from many people while each member still has one vote. And members lending their own savings to the place they live in.

Whoever lends, the same rule holds as everywhere on The Grove: money can fund the work but never buys a say. A loan is repaid, with interest if that's agreed. It never comes with a vote.

Inside an organisation on The Grove, part of this is already handled. The founder holds no last word, and the guardrails in Chapter 6 bite the moment a second person takes a seat. What the system can't reach is what sits outside it: a loan signed in one person's name, land registered to a few early members, a bank mandate with one signature on it. Those need a handover of their own.

So the strawman is soft first, hard late. The real value of a young community is the people in it and what they know, not its buildings. The first thing to grow is knowledge: a school, online, teaching what the community is learning to do. Knowledge costs almost nothing to copy, which makes it the first place costs fall towards zero, and the first source of outside income. Hard assets come later, once there's a collective able to hold them, and whatever is held in one or a few people's names passes to the organisation as its capacity to hold it grows.

What's open is what triggers the handover. A milestone tied to the organisation's capacity seems right. Leaving it to the choice of whoever holds them seems like founder's syndrome with extra steps.

Land and buildings

Land and housing need more money than a young community has. The strawman: borrow, from whoever will lend on fair terms, and let the outside world pay the loan. Build housing, rooms and space for courses, and let some of it to people outside the network. Outside rent services the debt. Members' own rent, where there is any, builds equity in their own commons rather than a landlord's. Schools and courses work the same way: the outside world pays to learn, and that money flows into the build.

The open question is how much of each site faces outward. Too little and the debt never clears. Too much and you've built a hotel with a community attached.

Surplus that seeds the next site

Once the first loan is paid, outside rent becomes surplus. The strawman is a revolving fund that lends to the next site, which repays from its own outside rent, which funds the site after that. The fund isn't the network. It's an organisation like any other, with its own purpose, lending into the commons, its own legal form and its own members.

There's a working precedent. The Mietshäuser Syndikat in Germany has used a version of this since the early 1990s: established housing projects pay a solidarity contribution that helps new ones start.² Whether the fund charges interest, how it chooses between sites, and whether sites can choose their fund are all open.

Keeping it in the commons

A site that has paid off its debt holds a valuable asset. One generation can vote to sell it, split the proceeds and walk away. Many kibbutzim faced exactly that pressure.³

The strawman borrows the Syndikat's answer: a lock-share. Each site is its own organisation with its own legal form, owned by its residents. The fund that lent to it holds one further share, with a single power: a veto on selling the asset or turning it into private property. Day to day, the residents decide everything. The lock only bites at the moment someone tries to cash out.

Where the lock should sit, with the fund, with a group of other sites, or with any site in the network, is open. So is what happens when a site genuinely needs to sell, to move somewhere better, say.

No single point of failure

The network could take a legal form, like any organisation on The Grove. But anything holding the whole network's assets becomes a target: one lawsuit, one regulator, one hostile government or buyer reaches everything.

So the strawman keeps the network's balance sheet thin. It holds agreements and the shared code, not the land. Assets and the liability that comes with them sit in the organisations that use them. And there would be several funds, in several countries, so that no one country's law can freeze the whole, with each site free to choose which to borrow from. How funds coordinate without becoming a cartel is open.

Money between organisations

Outside money is the outside world's lever. How would organisations in the network trade with each other without it?

The cleanest form we know is mutual credit. When one organisation supplies another, the supplier's balance goes up and the buyer's goes down by the same amount. The balances always sum to zero, nobody issues them, and there's nothing to buy or speculate on. It isn't a token in the crypto sense, and it fits The Grove's rule that nobody needs to hold one. Switzerland's WIR has run this way between businesses since 1934, and Sardex in Sardinia is a newer example.⁴ Outside money would be used only where something crosses the membrane. Credit limits, and how an organisation that leaves settles its balance, are open.

The state doesn't stop at the membrane

This is the one we didn't expect at first. Tax isn't only levied on what crosses the boundary. The state taxes economic activity wherever it happens, and values it in its own currency. A trade settled in WIR still owes VAT and income tax in francs. A member paid in credits for regular work is, to the tax authority, an employee owing income tax in pounds. Land taxes apply whether a building is let or shared.

So the outside money a network needs grows with how much of its inner life it puts a price on, not just with what it imports. The outward-facing work has to earn enough for imports and for tax on everything priced inside. That points straight at the next idea: price as little as possible. And where money is used inside, prefer forms that don't swing in value, so ordinary life doesn't generate capital-gains paperwork. The rules differ by country and change often. Each site would need its own tax adviser; there's no global answer.

Sharing rather than trading

If pricing everything creates tax, share instead. But a community still needs to see who gives what, or it gets free-riders on one side and burnout on the other. How do you keep a record of sharing without it becoming a trade?

Something becomes a trade when there's a quid pro quo: I give you this because you give me that, at an agreed value, with a balance someone can call in. Take those away and what's left is a record. So the strawman is a commons log with six rules:

• Record what flows, not debts between people. "Six hours to the kitchen." "Used the workshop on Tuesday." Nobody owes anybody else.
• Contribute to the whole, never to each other. Twin Oaks in Virginia has worked like this since 1967: members give labour hours to the community, and the community provides housing, food and care. No member pays another.⁵
• Access comes from membership, not points. The moment using something needs enough credits, the credits are money.
• Nothing can be passed on or cashed in. You can't give records away, sell them or cash them out. They're recognition, not currency.
• Many kinds, not one unit. Care, building, teaching and land work stay separate. Collapse them into one number and you've reinvented a price.
• Imbalances are met by conversation, not settlement. When someone keeps taking more than they give, or keeps giving until they break, people talk.

The split that falls out is clean. Mutual credit between organisations, where prices help. The commons log for life within one, where they don't.

There's a harder part. A commons only works if contribution is fair. The work gets done on branches, and branches need people's hours, but that tells you nothing about whether each person is giving their share in return for what they receive. Without a way to see that, a few people end up carrying everyone, others quietly take more than they give, and resentment does the rest. It's a downward spiral, and it has ended more communities than money has. So there would have to be a balance for each person: their hours set against the share they agreed to give.

That runs straight into one of our own rules: no points, counts or streaks about people. We'd rather say so than smooth it over. The way we'd hold the two together is the way The Grove already treats promises. Each member makes a promise to the commons, a share of hours in return for a home, food and care, and the record is of that promise being kept, firm on the promise and gentle on the person. Each person sees their own balance. Nobody is ranked, nothing is published as a league table, and nobody is compared with anyone else. When someone falls short for a sustained stretch, or gives far beyond their share until they're running dry, that starts a conversation with the people they share a home and work with, the way an at-risk promise does. And the balance never touches trust, the weight a person carries in decisions, which Chapter 17 keeps apart from money for the same reason.

Whether that's enough to keep a balance of hours from becoming a scoreboard, we don't know. It's the line we'd watch most closely.

And there's the tax authority again. Tax authorities judge substance, not ledger design. If the pattern is "work thirty hours, get a home and food", they may still call it employment with benefits in kind. The real defence is the community's legal form. In the UK, a mutual trading with its own members is generally not taxed on the surplus from that trading, and housing co-operatives owned wholly by their tenants sit outside much of ordinary landlord law.⁶ The US has a specific status for income-sharing communities, which Twin Oaks uses. This may be the hardest problem in the chapter.

When the outward business eats the organism

The rent that pays the debt pulls the culture towards being a landlord. The school becomes the business, and the community becomes staff. The kibbutzim that leaned hardest on outside industry and credit were among those hit worst when the debt crisis of the mid-1980s came.

The strawman is to make it visible. The network would read each site's outward share: how much of its effort and income faces the outside world, and which way that's going. A site whose outward share keeps rising after its debt has cleared is drifting, and the read says so, without blaming anyone, the way Chapter 19 reads drift between a branch's purpose and its work. Paired with the lock-share, the drift can never end in a sale. What a healthy outward share looks like is open. It probably rises while a site is paying for itself, then falls.

Costs falling towards their floors

The long-run hope is that the cost of living falls towards the cost of raw materials. For the cost of one more of something, that's largely true. Knowledge copies for nothing. Sun is free once the panels are up. Labour that's contributed rather than sold carries no price.

But three floors remain. Raw materials the network can't produce. Upkeep: roofs, pumps and panels wear out, and wear never stops. And tax. The honest goal is costs falling towards those three floors, and then working on each.

The order in which a network could bring things within seems roughly: knowledge, then energy, then food, then the upkeep of housing, then health. Law and money last, and never fully.

What stays outside

However large the network grows, and short of ever becoming a country of its own, which may never be the aim, some dependencies stay.

• Tax, in the host country's currency, on activity inside as well as outside.
• Land title under the host country's law. The commons owns the land only because a court agrees it does.
• Courts and contracts. Disputes the network can't settle itself end in someone else's court. Each organisation's operating agreement names its own rules, and a jury clause, as the first place a dispute goes, but whether courts defer to that is untested, as Chapter 18 said.
• Borders and residence. People can only gather where they're allowed to live.
• Outside money for imports. Anything that can't be made inside is bought with it.
• Regulation of building, food, schools and care.

Growth weakens each of these levers without removing any. Spreading across several countries means no one government holds all of them at once, and that may be the most realistic form of sovereignty there is for a network like this.

The shape of it

Pulled together, the strawman runs in six steps.

1. Seed. A gathering of people and a purpose. The school, online. First outside income from knowledge.
2. First site. Borrowed money; housing, rooms and space for courses; some of it let outward. The site is its own organisation with its own legal form, and a fund holds its lock-share.
3. Clearing the debt. Outside rent pays the loan. Inside, life runs on the commons log, with prices only where they help.
4. Surplus. A cleared site's outside income flows into a revolving fund, which lends to the next site.
5. Specialising. Sites differ: one grows food, one builds, one heals, one teaches. They trade in mutual credit. The network becomes self-sufficient long before any one site does.
6. Thinning the outside money. Each year, the network reads what it still buys from outside and what it could lose without collapsing, and works on the largest.

How we're thinking about it

We started from the failures, not the dream. Each part of the strawman answers a known way these attempts end: assets held in a few people's names, the generation that sells, the single body that can be sued or seized, the tax bill on a life that was priced, the side business that swallows the community. Where someone has already solved a piece, the Syndikat, WIR, Twin Oaks, we've borrowed rather than invented.

We kept the network thin and the organisations thick because that's how The Grove already works. The organisation is where people decide and where assets sit. The network holds agreements and the shared code, as Chapter 27 described, and a network that held more would become the centre we've designed out everywhere else.

And we've written it down before building any of it because the mistakes here are expensive and slow. A badly designed proposal can be reworked in a week. A site sold by the wrong generation is gone.

What we don't know

What triggers the handover of assets held in one or a few people's names. Where the lock-share should sit, and how a site that genuinely needs to sell can do so. What a healthy outward share looks like over a site's life. Whether a commons log can stay a record without becoming a scoreboard, and whether it survives a determined tax authority in each country. How several funds coordinate without becoming a centre. What happens to people who leave after years of contributing, and to people who grow old inside: what they take with them, and who cares for them. And what, if anything, the network itself should hold.

What you might take from this

The money part is rarely what breaks these attempts. It's ownership at the start, a sale at the end, the tax on a life that was priced, and people who burn out in between. A network that grows soft things before hard ones, locks its assets against being cashed out, keeps its centre thin, shares where it can and prices only where it must might need a little less of the outside world every year. None of that is proven. It's a place to start arguing. And what it's for isn't less. It's more: a world worth living in, owned by the people who live in it.

Meet the essentials within. Lock the commons. Price as little as you can.

Notes and further reading

Chapter 29. Rehearsing the future

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 pilots, consultants' maps and digital twins each leave a gap before a change is lived
• How organisations are grown by simulation, with simulated people in a simulated world, over days
• What a rehearsal is for: finding where structure creates friction or freedom, not picking winners
• Four decisions that came from watching simulated organisations go wrong
• What simulation can't tell us, and what we've decided but not built

The sceptic's objection here is short, and it's a good one.

You can't test an organisation before living it. An organisation is people, and people aren't predictable. Simulations of people are toys. They tell you what you put in, dressed up as discovery. Whatever a model says about how your team will behave, your team will do something else on Tuesday.

We agree with most of that. A simulation won't tell you what your organisation will do. Nothing will. But there's a narrower question it can help with, and it's the one that costs most when it's answered too late: where will this structure rub? Where will work sit with nobody holding it, where will a rule that looked fair on paper hand one person too much, where will people have to work around the system instead of through it? Those are questions about the structure, not about the people, and a structure can be rehearsed.

What finding out the hard way costs

Most organisations find out how a change works by making it.

A new way of deciding is announced at an away day. A team is split in two. Then everyone lives with it for six months, and the cost of the parts that didn't fit is paid by the people inside: the decisions that stalled, the work that fell between the new teams, the quiet person who ended up doing the admin for both. By the time the friction is visible, it has become "how things are here", and changing it again feels like failure.

There are three common ways to try to know sooner, and each leaves a gap.

A pilot runs the change for real, in one team. It's honest, because real people live it. But it's slow and costly, it can only be run once, and it tells you one future. If the pilot team happens to be unusually generous, or unusually tired, you learn about them as much as about the change. Nobody can run it again with the same people and one thing different.

A consultant's map draws the organisation as it is: boxes, flows, a diagnosis. It can be insightful. But a map is still. It shows where things are, not how they'll move once the change starts pushing on them.

A digital twin, borrowed from engineering, mirrors a live system closely enough to predict and optimise it. That works for a jet engine. For an organisation of people it promises something nobody can deliver: a faithful copy of how humans will choose.

Growing an organisation instead of drawing one

There's an older tradition that asks a humbler question. In the early 1970s Thomas Schelling showed, with nothing more than counters on a grid, that a town of people who each mildly prefer a few neighbours like themselves can sort itself into sharp divides nobody wanted.¹ The lesson wasn't a prediction about any real town. It was that small rules, followed by many people, make patterns none of them chose. Joshua Epstein and Robert Axtell took the idea further, growing whole artificial societies from simple agents on a landscape, to see which structures emerge from which rules.²

That is the spirit we work in. Alongside the system itself we keep a rig we call the harness. It grows an organisation by simulation: simulated people, in a simulated world, over days and sometimes months, using the system the way anyone would.

The people come from a pool of would-be members. Each has a temperament somewhere on a range, from generously supportive, through steady and transactional, to self-serving and, at the far end, predatory. Each has hours to give, things they're good at, and people they know, mostly people like themselves. Nobody joins by magic. They come only when someone already inside invites them, so who gets invited shapes who the organisation becomes. A self-serving person is planted close to the founder on purpose, because real organisations have them.

Some runs have a language model play each person, agenda and flaws included. Others play them by simple rules, which costs nothing and replays exactly. Either way, the simulated people can do only what the page offers a real person, and see only what a real person in their place could see. The harness has no back door into the system. If a simulated person does something no person could, that's counted as a fault in the harness, not a finding about the organisation.

Worlds with their own truth

An organisation needs something to be about, so the harness gives it a world.

The first was a small family kitchen: a young man selling his grandmother's baking, first at a car boot sale, then on a market stall, perhaps one day from a second kitchen. The second was a practice of facilitators who run group sessions for other organisations and one-to-ones booked by email. Others followed: a coaching collective working with charities, a small design studio, and a cooperative spread across four cities, branches four deep and a lot arriving every day.

Each world keeps its own truth. In the kitchen it knows what was really baked and sold, how good it really was, where the cash really went. The organisation knows only what its people chose to write down. The gap between the two is one of the things we watch, because that gap is where value leaks in real organisations too.

The world also writes in. Customers order and complain. Suppliers raise their prices. A market organiser offers a pitch and wants two people on the stall first. An inspector asks what's written down about allergens. In the facilitators' world, a client's HR director asks who came to the sessions: saying no holds the line on confidentiality, saying yes crosses it, and saying nothing loses the client. None of this tells anyone what to do. The organisation answers as it answers anything, and the world reads the answer the next morning.

We keep the world as written rules, not as a model telling a story each day. A storyteller would invent its own truth and couldn't be replayed.

Freezing a moment, and a fresh night each night

Two things make this a rehearsal rather than a performance.

The first is that a moment can be frozen. A founder's first hour with Wise-Eye, planting the organisation and bringing their work in, can be stopped and kept exactly as it stood. From there it can be grown on many times, each with a different run of chance, so one founding can be seen weeks later in a dozen futures. A thin start that looked fine in the hour shows itself in week six. The moments we grow for people trying The Grove for the first time work the same way: each is written down as its world, its starting chance and its day, and grown afresh wherever it runs. The same start grows the same organisation, day for day, on any machine.

That's also how most people will first meet The Grove. Before it goes live, the way in is a sandpit: a simulated organisation, grown up to a key moment in its life, where you step in and take the part of one of its people. A proposal is about to be decided, or work is arriving faster than a branch can hold, or a founder is about to share the root, and you're in the room for it. You can try things, get them wrong and start again. Nothing you do there touches a real organisation. It's a place to play, and to feel how it works from the inside, before anyone has to stake anything on it.

The second is that every night the harness runs on fresh ground. A new starting chance each night means a new stretch of possibilities: the kitchen and the facilitators' practice, a flood of mail and people who say yes to everything, a flood of ideas from below, a business that already runs laid in on its first day, a handful of first hours. Alongside them, drills walk each area of the rules step by step and check after every step that nothing has come apart. No model is called on those nights. Every run replays exactly from its starting chance, so anything strange can be seen again before anyone acts on it.

What the night looks for is friction. Most of what a run says is about the simulated society, not the system: that a self-serving person ended up holding the root, that nobody took up a measure. Those are read as questions about that society, never as a score. What matters is narrower: the system refusing something it offered, the books not adding up, structure running ahead of the work, the same work born twice, work left with no home.

Friction, not winners

This is the heart of it. A rehearsal doesn't ask which organisation wins. It asks where the structure gets in people's way, and where it gives them room.

One habit captures it. When a promise to someone outside is missed in a run, the harness puts it down to one cause: the harness itself, a rule of the simulation, the world, the people, or the system. Shown to someone who had a turn and not done is the people's. Shown to nobody who could act is the system's own, and only that one is ours to fix. It keeps us honest about what a simulation can and can't blame on design.

Martin Pfiffner, who has spent years putting Stafford Beer's viable system model to work in real companies, treats an organisation's structure as something to work through deliberately before people have to live inside it, rather than something inherited and patched.³ That's what the harness lets us do with the rules themselves. And George Box's warning, that every model is wrong and some are useful, is the right one to keep close.⁴ We're not trying to be right about people. We're trying to be useful about structure.

What it has changed

Some of the system's shape came straight from watching simulated organisations go wrong.

A promise made to a customer landed on a branch where nobody held it and its date drove nothing, so a promise is now carried by a named person, on a clock, and rises when it slips. An organisation under pressure was offered a split, then offered back together, then split again, so a job that has just moved now settles for eight weeks before anything offers to move it again. Budget allocations passed as quiet grabs because they carried only an amount, so a budget proposal now carries its evidence: the branch's pressure to grow, its load of work and what the money is for. And Wise-Eye, once trusted, confirmed orders on its own that a person would have paused over, so it may now send a promise by itself only when it sits within what's usual for that kind of work; anything outside waits for a person, with the reason shown.

The same runs are where the organisation's learned sense of itself, in Chapter 21, is first being taught, and the same caution holds: rehearse, don't foretell. An instinct learned only from simulated people is a model of a model, which is why it's checked against people who choose for themselves before anything is trusted.

What a simulation can't tell you

The limits are real, and we'd rather list them than have you find them.

Simulated people are models of people. A cheap model plays nice; we give the self-serving characters a stronger one because otherwise everyone is agreeable. Rules-played people are blunter still. Neither feels the sting of having a task taken from them, or the relief of a seat finally shared.

There's a deeper worry, and we've asked it of ourselves: if the system is tested against the harness, and shaped by what the harness shows, can the testing be trusted? Part of our answer is more than one world, so that what was fitted to one kitchen shows up as not fitting a facilitators' practice. Part is a hard line that the worlds live in the harness and never in the product. Nothing from any world appears in the system's code, and the guidance Wise-Eye reads carries principles, never cases; a check refuses a world's details where the model reads. The system's own tests never call a real model, and neither do the nightly runs. Model-played runs are separate, paid for separately, stopped at a hard budget, and the key never enters the record.

And some things can't be learned without real organisations at all: whether a forum trusts the readings, how a clock on a promise feels on a bad week, whether people will grant Wise-Eye standing and take it back. A simulation can show where a structure rubs. Only people can show whether the rubbing matters.

What we're building towards

The obvious next step is to turn this towards a real organisation. Before a big change, take a frozen copy of a live organisation, let the proposal play out on the copy many times, and see where it creates friction or freedom. Not a prediction of what will happen, which no living thing allows, but a rehearsal.

We've decided the direction and parked it. On 1 November 2026, freezing a live organisation to rehearse a proposal was set aside until the core has settled with real people in it. When it comes, the intent is that it belongs to the organisation's own forum: something people deciding a change can ask for, read and argue with, never a verdict handed down from outside.

The groundwork exists as an experiment. The harness can already take an organisation at a given day and play many futures from it, with each possible change given its own futures on the same runs of chance, so the difference you see is the change and not luck. Those forecasts are sealed before they're scored against what happened, and they're shown to no organisation until forecasts like them have been measured against reality. The only kind we'd ever point at a real organisation is the one that knows people as a stranger would, from what they do, never from a temperament someone wrote down.

How we decided

We weighed three ways of knowing sooner. Pilots alone were too slow, couldn't be run twice, and put the cost on real people first. A model narrating each day was cheap to build and impossible to trust. A faithful twin of human behaviour promised too much.

We chose to grow organisations through the system's own front door, in worlds with a truth of their own, replayable from a starting chance, and read for friction rather than outcomes. We chose more than one world, because one world can't tell what generalises from what was fitted. And we chose to keep every world out of the product, so the system can't quietly learn to pass its own test.

What's uncertain is how far the rehearsal will travel. Simulated friction has pointed us to real flaws in the rules, each traced by hand before anything changed, but none of it has yet been checked against a real organisation. Whether a rehearsal on a frozen copy of a living organisation helps its forum decide better, or just gives an argument a chart to hide behind, is something only use will show.

What you might take from this

You can't rehearse people. You can rehearse a structure, many times, before anyone pays for it, and look for where it rubs rather than who wins.

A rehearsal isn't a forecast: it finds the friction before your people have to.

Notes and further reading

On Stafford Beer's viable system model, which Pfiffner builds on, see Chapter 20. For simulation as a way of asking "what structure produces this?" rather than "what will happen?", Epstein's later essays, collected as Generative Social Science (Princeton University Press, 2006), are a clear and readable place to start.

Chapter 30. Back to society

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

• What the usual organisation teaches, and why so much of people's energy goes quiet
• The habits an organisation on The Grove asks for, and how they travel into families, communities and civic life
• What changes when AI carries the load, and the risk if it runs the other way
• The squeeze AI puts on human work, and why it may call people to hold the why: meaning, care, feeling and presence
• A direction we're testing: a society whose needs are met by many small organisations, owned by no one
• The open questions, gathered from across the book, and where serious people disagree with us
• Why the book ends on an experiment, and an invitation

By now a sceptic has every right to say it.

Nice idea. Perhaps a few small organisations will run like this, the ones full of people who already wanted to. But the big organisations will stay big and stay bossed, and governments will move at the speed of governments. And a piece of software, however careful, isn't going to touch the climate, or the next war, or the way power gathers wherever it can.

We take that seriously, because it's mostly true. Nothing in this book changes the world on its own. Chapter 1 never claimed it would. It claimed something smaller and, we think, harder to dismiss: that organisations are where most adults learn, every working day, how power works, and that what we practise there we carry everywhere else.

So the last chapter goes back to where the first began, and asks what that practice might add up to.

Energy with nowhere to go

Think about what a working week in a bossed organisation teaches, quietly, without anyone meaning it to.

That someone above you decides. That noticing a problem is risky if it implicates someone senior, and pointless if nobody senior is listening. That agreement is something you perform in a meeting and drop in the corridor. That leaving is a betrayal, so people stay and go quiet instead.

None of that stays at work. It turns up at the ballot box, as the feeling that politics is something done to you. Albert Hirschman named the two responses people have when an organisation declines: they speak up, or they leave.¹ Most working lives teach neither. They teach a third thing, which is to stay and say nothing.

The usual reading of that silence is that people don't care. We think it's the wrong reading. People aren't lazy. Their will has nowhere to go. Most people carry something they would pour themselves into given the chance: an idea, a craft, a care for some corner of the world. The tower, bosses stacked on bosses, spends that energy on sign-offs, status meetings and someone else's roadmap, a little at a time, until it goes quiet. It isn't apathy. It's energy with nowhere to go.

If that's right, the shortage isn't of people who want something different. It's of somewhere to put them: a structure that holds people instead of boxing them in. The cost of the box is the familiar one, a business that never hears what its people know. The prize for a better shape is harder to measure: whatever all that stored energy would do if it had a way out.

The habits that travel

An organisation on The Grove asks five things of the people in it, and each one is also a habit.

Sensing. Anyone who belongs can call a sensing in the Field: a question put to a part of the organisation, answered in people's own words, blind, with every voice weighing the same. Over months, people learn that what they notice is worth saying, and that a group can listen to itself without anyone being singled out.

Raising. Anyone holding a seat can raise a tension, and anyone can surface one through a sensing or feedback. Tensions that go unanswered climb, a forum at a time, until the whole organisation has either answered them or said plainly that it hasn't. People learn that a problem doesn't have to be somebody's fault to be worth raising, and that a raised problem doesn't quietly vanish.

Consenting. Decisions are made by the people who carry the work, on a clock, with advice open to everyone and a concern required to name a harm, not a preference. Every decision comes back for review. People learn the difference between "I'd do it differently" and "this will hurt something", and they learn to live with decisions they didn't love, because there's a day when each one is looked at again.

Keeping promises. A commitment to someone outside has firm steps and dates, and when one is in trouble the answer is more eyes and more hands, not more pressure on a person. People learn that their word can be held without anyone standing over them.

Leaving freely. Leaving needs nobody's permission and takes effect at once. People learn that staying is a choice they keep making, which changes what staying means.

These aren't exotic skills. They're what a village hall committee needs, or a town that shares a river. Elinor Ostrom found that the commons which lasted for centuries were held by ordinary people who had learned to make and keep their own rules: to watch the resource together, to settle disputes they could all reach, to meet again.² Those capacities weren't innate. They were practised.

A society of sovereigns isn't built by a manifesto. It's built by millions of people who have practised sensing, raising, consenting, keeping their word and leaving honestly, and who start to expect the same of the other places they belong. Someone who has spent two years in a forum where a concern has to name a harm will notice when a council meeting doesn't ask for one.

When AI carries the load

The habits are old. What's new is that something can carry the work that used to crowd them out.

In an organisation on The Grove, Wise-Eye takes much of the load that crowds them out: it routes what arrives, drafts replies, keeps track of what's promised and says what's at risk. It acts for a named branch and says so. It earns standing one kind of work at a time, and loses it again without anyone having to remember to take it away. It never consents, never blocks and never holds a seat.

It can run the other way, and the sceptics of AI in governance are right to say so loudly. An AI that decides because it's quicker. An AI that agrees with everyone and helps the wrong things happen faster. An AI that does the noticing so well that people stop noticing for themselves, until the habits above wither from disuse.

Our answer is structural, as it was in Chapter 22: build no way for the AI to have a say, make everything it does visible, and keep its standing losable. That answers the first two risks better than the third, which we'll only see in how people behave.

People hold the why

There's a harder question underneath. Machines already take in more than we can and find patterns we miss, and they're getting better at making things too. As they take on more of the thinking, the analysing and even the creating, the room people used to fill with that work shrinks. Call it a squeeze on human mindshare. It's already being felt, and it will tighten.

A squeeze is also a call. If the how of the work moves to the machines, what's left for people is the why: what this is for, who it serves, whether it's worth doing at all. Meaning has never come out of analysis. It's made by people, together, out of what they care about. And thinking was never our only kind of intelligence. A surfer doesn't calculate a wave; she feels it and moves. A good facilitator knows the room has turned before anyone has spoken. Purpose, care, feeling, attunement, being present with each other, making something beautiful together: these aren't a consolation prize for losing the analytical race. They may be the parts of us most working lives have barely asked for. The futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard called the next step after the human potential movement a social potential movement: the same question about what we could become, asked of people together rather than one at a time. People who have worked on human development have long described a widening that runs the same way, from fear to love, from me to we, from surviving to alive, from a self-centred view to one that takes in the whole. Otto Scharmer calls it the shift from ego-system to eco-system awareness. Not back to some lost garden, but through to something wider.

Picture it working. People hold the purpose and the judgement; the machines carry the weight. A crew decides what's worth making and why, and finds that the making is no longer the hard part.

This is where I have to speak for myself, because it's a belief before it's a design. For most of my life I trusted my head, and I was good enough inside the models I'd built. The times I was at my best weren't like that. They were faster than thought: closer to riding a wave than predicting one, a kind of feeling with the people and the situation in front of me. I've come to think that's the intelligence we've barely begun to use. When machines out-think us, and they will, the advantage left to us isn't a better mind. It's a different place to stand: in the heart, in purpose, in feeling, with each other.

I know how that can sound. But I've worked from that place, not just sat in it, and I was more useful there than anywhere my head ever took me. So when I picture what comes next, I don't picture people pushed aside. I picture people holding the why, machines carrying the how, and the two of us making things more beautiful than either could alone. That's the seed I'm trying to plant: sovereign people, in purposeful organisations, that together make a fairer society where people create from the fire in their hearts. I can't prove it. I can only build towards it, and invite you in.

We hold this as a hope and a direction, not a finding. The same squeeze can hollow people out. Some have built who they are around the work that's going, and losing it can be a real crisis, not a liberation. Freed time can turn into distraction as easily as care. A person squeezed out of their work with nothing to hold them doesn't become more human; they become lost. That's part of why the shape of an organisation matters now: one that holds people, asks for their sensing and keeps the decisions with them gives the squeeze somewhere to go. It can't make anyone find meaning. It can leave room for it, or take that room away.

A society that meets its own needs

Here is the picture we're reaching for. It isn't a forecast. It's a direction we're testing, one organisation at a time.

Put sovereign people at the centre: whole, free to join and leave, belonging to several organisations at once, held while they're there. Around them, sovereign organisations, each governing itself and each meeting one need. Around those, a sovereign society: its needs met from within, by many organisations working together, and owned by no one.

The needs fall into two kinds of work. There's the hard work of getting things done: food, water and power, homes and land, health, safety, money and law. And there's the soft work of holding the people who do it: care, learning, belonging, voice, resolving conflict, celebration. In this picture the two lean on each other, and organisations serve each other across the divide. A care practice holds the safety crew after a fire. Learning feeds the people growing food and building homes. Water and power keep the halls lit where people meet. Money and law lean on the mediators when a dispute comes. Local voice carries a safety warning faster than any notice board. Each line is an agreement between two organisations, each decided by its own forum, as Chapter 26 described.

The starter packs already sketch a near version: a community on its own land, a power co-operative, a neighbourhood café, a client practice for law and accounts, a practice that holds other organisations' difficult conversations. None of them is large. That's the point.

And organisations on The Grove grow the way living things do. A branch that has outgrown itself divides; a new organisation can be born from an old one carrying the whole pattern with it, as Chapter 24 described. Groves seed groves. A bakery seeds a kitchen, the kitchen a school, the school a clinic nobody rules. The long ambition is that much of what large institutions do today could be done by networks of small, self-owned organisations, each holding the full pattern, with no throne for anyone to seize.

A network like that could also do something no society has been able to do: tell us how it's doing. If each organisation can sense itself, as Chapter 21 describes, the network of them can be read the same way, without collecting anyone's records, and the read back from society that Chapter 2 hoped for begins to exist. We're building towards the first step of that, not the last.

How a network might actually get there, starting with no capital and no land, keeping what it builds from being sold, and needing a little less outside money each year, is sketched as a strawman in Chapter 28.

None of this needs a revolution. Nobody has to tear the tower down. People build around it, and over time the tower matters less. We aren't protesting. We're outgrowing.

And here is the hinge, because without it the picture would be a manifesto. We're not there yet, and no early organisation changes a government. Nothing in this design makes it impossible to capture, and we won't claim otherwise. But every large, unanswerable institution was once small, and chose its shape. The ones being founded now can choose differently.

Committing together

Chapter 1 named the trap underneath the crises: a race to the bottom, where everyone does what nobody wants because nobody can afford to stop first. Within one organisation, people can agree to hold back together. Between organisations, the same thing needs a way to commit together.

What exists today is the ground two organisations stand on: an agreement each side decides by its own forum, seen by both, looked back on in words, and ended by either. That's useful. It isn't an answer to the race.

The answer would be many organisations pledging to act, to pay a living wage or cut what they burn, only when enough others pledge too, and switching on together so nobody moves first alone. We're building towards that, and it's an intention more than a design. Which forum can bind a whole organisation to a pledge, what counts as enough, and how a pledge is seen to be kept without organisations policing each other, are all unanswered. If the society sketched above depends on anything, it depends on this, and it isn't built.

What we don't know

The book has tried to say what's open where it's open. Gathered in one place, it's a long list, and we'd rather it were read than skimmed.

Most of the numbers are guesses: the lengths of the decision clocks, the fourteen days before a tension climbs, how much evidence Wise-Eye needs before it earns standing. Trust is designed to fade unless it's renewed; in the system as it runs today it doesn't fade yet, and the right rate is a genuine open question. There's no emergency path; the fire alarm is designed and not built. The organisation's learned sense of itself is building towards, and whether it can sense an organisation's health from shape alone, we don't know. The Steward that looks after the shared code as an organisation in its own right is decided for the day The Grove goes live, and isn't built yet; the network of organisations beyond that comes later. The everyday signature, the human hand a bank or landlord wants on a page, isn't designed at all.

And beneath all of these sits the largest. None of it has yet been lived by real organisations at scale.

Where serious people disagree

Some who disagree with us have thought about organisations longer and harder than we have.

Source theory holds that every organisation has a global source, the person who took the first risk and listens for the whole, and that without one there's a vacuum. We put the whole in everyone's sight and let unanswered problems climb instead. But a founder alone is exactly the centre source theory describes, and nothing guarantees a founder lets go.

The viable system model says a surviving organisation needs functions that manage the present and weigh it against the future. We spread those across forums and bets, and the honest gap is that no single place weighs the outside world against today for the whole.

PowerShift keeps a permanent human Orchestrator who holds the whole and ratifies binding acts. We refused that, because a standing seat is one others learn to wait for. But until our signature is designed, a fair reader could find theirs the more truthful answer to what the law needs.

Sociocracy puts everyone who belongs in a circle, so everyone has consent somewhere. We let people belong without a forum, at the cost that a member outside every forum has no consent anywhere.

Co-operatives give every member one vote and the power to remove those who run things. We have no member vote on who holds a seat; the equal voice lives in the Field and informs rather than decides. Some co-operative readers will call that a step backwards, and they may be right.

And there's an older warning. Jo Freeman showed that groups claiming to have no structure grow hidden elites instead, the friends who decide over dinner.³ We've tried to answer her by making the structure visible rather than absent; whether hidden power finds new places to hide, her readers will tell us.

How we decided

We weighed ending with a vision: a confident picture of a society of such organisations. We chose not to end there. A vision is a hypothesis, as Chapter 14 argued, and a book that tested every founder's bet and then closed on an untested one of its own would contradict itself. But we also weighed leaving the picture out, and that felt like a different kind of dishonesty, because the picture is why we built any of this. So it's here, set down as a direction with its hinge beside it, and followed straight away by everything we don't know.

We gathered the open questions in one place, because a reader deciding whether to try this deserves to see the whole of what we don't know at once.

And we weighed how much to claim for society. What we believe is narrower than the picture: that the habits practised at work travel, that people's energy goes quiet for want of somewhere to go, that as AI takes more of the how, people can be left holding the why or simply left out, and that whether organisations can commit together is the step that would turn many small changes into something larger. Each of those can be tested. None of them is proven.

Life is an experiment

We began with that phrase, and it's the only honest place to end.

A branch grows where the work proves it's needed and fades where it doesn't. This book is the same. It was written in public, while the thing it describes was still being built, and parts of it will turn out to be wrong.

If the bets hold, the change is simple to say. People would no longer be a workforce, but a force for life: free to sense, to care, to create, to choose, to belong. Collaboration would be the new competition, as we said at the start. And the future would be something to look forward to again, rather than something to brace for.

So here is the invitation. If you've practised sociocracy or Holacracy and seen where this will break, tell us. If you've run a co-operative and think we've given away something that mattered, tell us. If you study the viable system model, or AI, or commons, and see the flaw we can't, tell us that too. And if you carry something you'd pour yourself into, and nowhere to put it, start small: one seed, one crew. Someday is a tower too. The book will change when you do, and say so.

What you might take from this

As AI becomes the how, people are called to hold the why, and organisations that hold people instead of boxing them in are where that, and a society of sovereigns, can start to grow.

Notes and further reading

For the social potential movement and the idea of humanity growing into a wider self: Hubbard, B. M. (1998), Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential, New World Library. For organisations that already run without traditional hierarchy, and what their people found: Laloux, F. (2014), Reinventing Organizations, Nelson Parker. For organisations as living systems in which information, relationship and identity do the organising: Wheatley, M. J. (1992), Leadership and the New Science, Berrett-Koehler. For the shift from ego-system to eco-system awareness, in economies as well as in people: Scharmer, C. O. and Kaufer, K. (2013), Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies, Berrett-Koehler. For the traditions this chapter disagrees with, the notes to Chapters 10, 20 and 18 point to the sources. On what people reach for once their needs are met: Maslow, A. H. (1971), The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, Viking. On an economy built on gift and connection rather than scarcity: Eisenstein, C. (2011), Sacred Economics, Evolver Editions. On why well-run incumbents can't follow what grows up around them: Christensen, C. M. (1997), The Innovator's Dilemma, Harvard Business School Press.

Measured against the P2P Foundation

A working draft, November 2026; expect it to change. One of a series weighing what we've built against the work of networks whose ideas we respect.

In this page

• What's being measured: an operating system, the networks of organisations running it, and The Grove, the first of them
• Our understanding of the P2P Foundation's ideas, which we'd welcome being corrected on
• Seven of those ideas in turn: what we chose, why, how we think it lines up, and where we might be wrong
• The places we're least sure of, for the commons movement to push on

If you've followed the commons movement for any length of time, you've seen this before. Someone builds a platform for collaboration. It speaks the language of peers, self-management and shared value. The early users do the real work: they bring their organisations, their patterns, their trust. Then whoever owns the platform turns that shared work into a product and sells it back, and the users find they've built someone else's asset.

So a reader from the commons world should arrive with suspicions. That this is a platform with a friendly face, and someone owns it. That its code isn't open, which in this world usually means it isn't really a commons. That it runs on a blockchain, and blockchains have a long record of turning cooperation into speculation.

This page doesn't try to argue those suspicions away. It sets out what we chose, why, and how we think it lines up with the P2P Foundation's ideas, so that you can test our reasoning and tell us where it fails.

What's being measured

Three things, and it helps to keep them apart.

The operating system is the software an organisation runs: the rules for seats, decisions, trust, money and work, with a few guardrails at its core that nobody inside an organisation can vote away. It has no name of its own. Each organisation runs its own copy.

A network is organisations, each running its own copy of the operating system, that recognise one another and share agreements. It's a network of operating systems, not one system everyone shares. What lets them work together is in the operating system each of them holds, and nobody owns the network. We're building towards each organisation holding its own side of everything it does with others, its services, its needs and its agreements, so that there's no network data held anywhere else. As the code stands, those still sit in one shared store; moving them into each organisation is part of what has to be built before The Grove goes live. Each network has a Steward: an organisation that looks after the network's code and ships its releases. The Steward isn't the network, and it holds nothing an organisation needs in order to keep running.

The Grove is the first such network. It's still being built and tested. At go-live, each organisation becomes its own independent DAO, running its own copy, and the Steward becomes an organisation in its own right.

One more word used below. Inside an organisation, decisions are made in forums. A branch is governed in one forum: the stewards of its parent and of its sibling branches, with the branch's own steward taking part as a person. The root has no parent, so it's governed by its own stewards and the stewards of the branches grown directly from it. Forums are made of people, not branches: someone holding several seats can sit in several forums, and counts once in any one of them. A forum with fewer than two distinct people passes its decisions on towards the root.

We keep to the rule the rest of the book follows: is only for what's built, building towards for what's decided but not built, and we don't know for what's open.

Our understanding of the P2P Foundation

This is how we understand the Foundation. If we've got any of it wrong, we'd like to be corrected, and we'll change the page.

As we understand it, the P2P Foundation is a non-profit research body and global network, registered in the Netherlands and active since 2005, that studies and promotes commons-oriented peer-to-peer dynamics in society, and works to help people, organisations and governments move towards commons-based approaches.¹ Its wiki is one of the largest collections of knowledge about peer production anywhere. It documents projects rather than building them, and describes itself as an organised network that helps networks form without directing them.²

Over two decades its research has produced ideas that anyone from this world will reach for when weighing something new. We've used seven:

1. The three institutions of peer production: a productive community, an entrepreneurial coalition and a for-benefit association.
2. Generative, not extractive: value made in common shouldn't be captured by whoever owns the platform it runs on.
3. Open cooperativism: cooperatives oriented to the common good, governed by their stakeholders, co-producing commons, and organised globally.
4. Reciprocity licensing: knowledge free to those who contribute to it, with reciprocity asked of those who only profit from it.
5. Open books and contributory accounting: value recognised beyond the price signal, with the books open to those who take part.
6. Cosmo-localism: what's heavy stays local, what's light is global and shared.
7. Commons infrastructure: the tools a commons runs on should be held in common too, not rented.

The Foundation certifies nothing, so this isn't a compliance check. It's our own reading, and it may be a generous one. That's what the sections on where we might be wrong are for.

1. The three institutions of peer production

Our understanding. Peer production tends to settle into three kinds of institution: a productive community that builds a shared resource, an entrepreneurial coalition that makes livelihoods on top of it, and a for-benefit association that keeps the infrastructure of cooperation alive without directing the work.³

What we chose, and why. Organisations are where livelihoods are made: each is its own member-run body with its own purpose, money and people. A network is the agreements between them, and the means to make them is in the operating system every organisation holds, so nobody owns it. The Steward keeps the shared code going and ships improvements, and it can't direct any organisation's work. We made the Steward an organisation like any other, bound by the same rules, rather than a separate kind of body, because we didn't want any part of the system to sit above the rules the rest live by. The Steward becomes an organisation in its own right from the day The Grove goes live.

How we think it lines up. Closely: organisations as the coalition, the Steward as the for-benefit role. The productive community is less clear-cut. Inside each organisation it's the members; across a network, it's whoever contributes back to the shared code and patterns.

Where we might be wrong. A foundation's charter can be harder to change than an organisation's rules, so a Steward governed like everyone else might be a weaker safeguard, not a stronger one. And a Steward with seats of its own might, over time, start to direct what it was meant only to support.

2. Generative, not extractive

Our understanding. The Foundation's name for the pattern at the top of this page is netarchical capitalism: value made by a commons and captured by whoever owns the network it runs on.⁴ The generative alternative keeps the value with those who create it.

What we chose, and why.

• What an organisation holds. We're building towards each organisation being its own unit of software on the Internet Computer, holding its own records, documents and decisions, and controlled by its own decision-making from the day it's created. Nobody will be able to push code into an organisation: adopting a release will be its own decision, by its own proposal, with a delay and a way back. We chose this so that there's nothing for an owner of the network to capture, because the network holds nothing an organisation needs.⁵
• What leaves an organisation. An organisation can choose to share its pattern with the Steward, and it's less than it sounds. No text leaves: not its purpose, accountabilities, practices or measures, and nothing anyone has written. The pattern is made inside the organisation's own core, and it carries only the general shape of the organisation and the general kind of work it does, not what any of it says. Its DNA, the living whole of its purpose, documents, playbooks and people, never leaves. An organisation that shares gets back what's working for organisations like it; one that doesn't loses only that. We're building towards this.
• Who earns. When one organisation provides a service to another, what it earns is its own; the Steward takes nothing from what passes between organisations. The Steward charges for its own services, setting organisations up, its own starter packs and the plan an organisation pays for, with a margin on top. That margin pays real costs: maintaining the code, the AI agents that help write it, testing it for how it looks and feels to use, how it holds up at scale and how it stands up to attack, much of which spends AI tokens too, hardware and computing, training and testing the models the operating system uses, its own running costs on the chain, and making the idea known. How large the margin should be is open.

Without a margin there would be no Steward. The code would have to be open to everyone, and then the questions become who can see it, who maintains it, and who stops someone stripping out its guardrails and selling it on. The Steward is a guard as much as a maintainer. We'd rather name the margin as a risk than pretend it isn't there. Any organisation can offer starter packs and services to others, at any price, including free. And what a Steward can charge is held in check by the cost of leaving: organisations can detach and run alone, or, once they've shown real commitment, form a network with a Steward of their own.

• Who can't buy a say. Trust and money are kept apart, with no way to turn one into the other, so money can fund the work but never buy a voice. That's one of the guardrails in the operating system's core, which no organisation can vote away, not even unanimously.⁶

How we think it lines up. Well, by design. The value an organisation creates stays in it, and the Steward earns from its own work, not from a cut of everyone else's.

Where we might be wrong. A margin is a risk. The commons world has good reasons to be wary of a for-benefit role that earns one, and a guard that's paid can grow fond of being paid. The cost of leaving only disciplines price if there's somewhere to go, and while there's one network, there's one Steward. And a Steward that sees many organisations' shared patterns may be gathering a kind of value that ought to belong to the network rather than to it.

3. Open cooperativism

Our understanding. Open cooperativism asks a cooperative fit for the age of networks to do four things: be oriented by its own rules towards the common good; be governed by all its stakeholders; co-produce commons, immaterial and material; and organise globally while producing locally.⁷

What we chose, and why.

• Oriented to the common good. Value tied to an organisation's purpose can never be taken out of it, not even by everyone agreeing. Trust is given by peers and can never be bought. These rules are written into the operating system's core and checked by tests. We've also designed trust to fade if it isn't renewed, so that power never settles; that isn't running yet. We chose rules in the core over rules in a document because documents get amended when people are tired.
• Governed by those who carry the work, and heard by those it touches. We gave nobody a seat by category. Stakeholders aren't seated as a group; their part is passive by default. But anyone can become active with an organisation: a customer, a supplier, a neighbour can join it and hold a seat, as far as the organisation's needs allow. The operating system uses the advice process: any member can give advice on any proposal; it's actively asked of those the change affects and those with proven skill in what it touches; and the people seated in the forum decide by consent, meaning nobody there holds a reasoned objection.⁸ We chose this because seats by category tend to turn decisions into negotiations between interests, and we wanted decisions made by the people closest to the work, with everyone affected heard first and anyone free to come closer.
• Where being affected gives more than a voice. Anyone who depends on something the organisation holds, as a home, a livelihood, a supply or a way in, goes on record. A proposal to part with it can't be made until it carries a landing for each of them, and where the thing is locked to the purpose, those who depend on it can stop it being moved.⁹ That's built.
• People outside the membership take part when invited into a sensing, answering by link, their voice kept beside the members' rather than mixed into it.

How we think it lines up. Strongly on the common good. On co-producing commons, partly; see reciprocity below. On organising globally, yes; see cosmo-localism. On stakeholder governance we've taken a different road, deliberately.

Where we might be wrong. Being heard isn't the same as having a share in the decision. The door to a seat is open, but it opens only as far as an organisation needs, and the people most affected by an organisation, customers, neighbours, suppliers, may need more than that. Our choice may protect the people inside at the expense of the people around them.

4. Reciprocity and a bounded commons

Our understanding. Commons-based reciprocity licences, copyfair and the Peer Production License among them, keep knowledge free to those who contribute to the commons and ask for reciprocity from those who only profit from it.¹⁰

What we chose, and why. The operating system's code isn't open source. On The Grove, only a few people, seated for the purpose, can read it. We're building towards every organisation carrying the full code with it, sealed, from its first day. The seal opens when organisations that have shown real commitment, verified people holding their root and a record of work done, come together to form a network of their own. Then they can read the code, change it and take it anywhere.

We chose this for two reasons. Capture: a system built to stop people being bossed has to be hard to strip of its guardrails and resell under a similar name, and an open kernel can be taken by anyone well funded. And security: every party holding the source is another way in. We chose to carry the sealed code with every organisation from the start, rather than release it on leaving, so that a captured Steward could never hold it back.

Value flows back in three ways. An organisation whose tension becomes part of a release can be credited for it; organisations are credited, never people. A network that offers an improvement back gets it back as functionality, along with everyone else, and no money changes hands. And an organisation's DNA stays its own, going with it if it divides. The licence for code once the seal opens is still open, with legal advice to come, and copyfair is one of the options.

How we think it lines up. Partly. It's a bounded commons: shared with those who've shown commitment, not with everyone.

Where we might be wrong. A commons shared only with the committed may not be a commons at all, and sealed code asks people to trust guardrails they can't read until they've already committed. A reciprocity licence might protect against capture as well as earned access does, without the seal.

5. Open books and contributory accounting

Our understanding. The Foundation argues for moving beyond relying only on market prices, towards open book accounting and ways of recognising contribution that money misses.¹¹

What we chose, and why. Inside an organisation, the books are open to every member: anyone can read them, every loan and what's free to spend, and money recorded on someone's word is open to question for a week. Pay shares a period's earnings by weights the organisation sets for itself: hours given, seats held, contribution as the organisation's own peers see it, and equal shares. Revenue booked to a branch is never a basis for pay, so the people who care, sense and hold the work aren't starved by those whose work happens to show up as income. Under all of it sits a floor, an equal amount for each member, paid first. As built, the floor comes from each period's profit, so a lean month can leave it empty; we're changing it to come from what the organisation has free, capped so it can never pay out more than is there.

Beyond its own members, each organisation chooses how open it is to everyone else in the network: how far anyone in the network can explore it and read it, set for the whole organisation and branch by branch, up to and including its books. We're building towards that. Some of it is already there: a branch can publish what it keeps to the open web, or to named partners with a key, and offer its services and needs publicly or to organisations it chooses. We left the choice with each organisation, because how open to be is part of what makes an organisation itself. What isn't designed yet is openness as a shared practice across a network, such as open supply chains.

How we think it lines up. Well within an organisation. Across a network, as far as each organisation chooses to open itself.

Where we might be wrong. Leaving openness to each organisation may mean most choose little of it, and open books across a network may need to be the default rather than a choice. And contribution as peers see it becomes something worth gaming once it carries any share of pay.

6. Cosmo-localism

Our understanding. The motto is "what is heavy should be local, and what is light should be global and shared."¹²

What we chose, and why. Land, money, liability and people stay with each organisation. Patterns, starter packs and improvements to the code travel. A network keeps a thin balance sheet: agreements and shared code, not land, because anything holding everyone's assets becomes a target. The Steward isn't the network, and nothing it holds stops an organisation from operating. For networks of physical sites we've sketched ideas borrowed from the commons world: the Mietshäuser Syndikat's lock against selling a site off, mutual credit between organisations on the WIR model, and a record of contribution inside a community that doesn't turn sharing into trading.¹³ These are sketches, not things we've built.

How we think it lines up. Closely, in its shape.

Where we might be wrong. A network that holds almost nothing may be too thin to do what the commons needs done together, and the physical-site sketches haven't met a single real site yet.

7. Commons infrastructure

Our understanding. The Foundation's recent work looks at protocols and shared ledgers as commons in their own right, held globally, with governance kept close to the communities that use them.¹⁴

What we chose, and why. The operating system runs on the Internet Computer because no one party can switch an organisation's software off there, own it, or shut it down by seizing a server or leaning on an owner. DFINITY, the foundation behind it, describes what runs there as tamperproof and unstoppable.¹⁵ We think it's safer than any cloud host we know. It isn't a token economy: there's no token in the code, and the operating system never holds or moves an organisation's money. It reads the organisation's own books and governs how that money is allocated. AI models and email sit outside the chain, so a thin gateway, the stoma, carries that traffic. It holds nobody's data at rest, its source is given freely, and an organisation can run its own; on The Grove the Steward runs one shared stoma for everyone, because that's easier.

How we think it lines up. Strongly, but not absolutely. No host is beyond its own governance, and that's as true of cloud providers as of chains; a cloud provider can close an account on its own. The Internet Computer is governed by a vote of those who've staked its token. That vote can't reach into an organisation's own governance or change its decisions. What it can do, through a slow and public process, is take one unit of software off the network: a kind of proposal exists that can uninstall a canister's code, and in December 2021, after a copyright complaint about content hosted on the network, a proposal to remove one was raised and argued over in public.¹⁶ So the remaining risk is a single organisation being taken off the network by a public vote, not the network being shut down. The operating system's core is ordinary code with the chain kept at the edge, so in principle it could move.

We'd be open to running on commons infrastructure instead, or as well. Co-operatively owned hosting exists, Hostsharing in Germany and the Co-op Cloud network among others, and so do agent-centric systems such as Holochain that need no central host at all.¹⁷ What we'd want from any of them is what we chose the Internet Computer for: that no one party, the host included, can switch an organisation off.

Where we might be wrong. We haven't yet found another host we'd trust as much, so "it could move" is untested. And the infrastructure isn't held by the organisations that run on it; it's governed by the chain's own token holders, a different community with different interests.

Where things stand

Where we're least sure

None of this is an open commons, and we don't claim it is. These are the choices we're least sure of. We'd rather you pushed on our reasoning than took our word for it.

1. The bounded commons. We sealed the code to protect against capture. We may have protected it from the very people a commons should be open to.
2. The advice process over stakeholder seats. We chose decisions by the people closest to the work, with everyone affected heard first. That may leave the people around an organisation with too little say.
3. The Steward's margin. Without it there's no Steward, and without a Steward the code would have to be open to anyone, guardrails and all. We think the cost of leaving keeps it honest. With one network and one Steward, that discipline is mostly theoretical for now, and a paid guard is a risk in its own right.
4. Openness left to each organisation. Each organisation chooses how explorable and readable it is to the rest of the network, because how open to be is part of what makes an organisation itself. A commons may need more of it as the default.
5. A thin network. The Steward isn't the network, and the means to work together lives in each organisation's own copy of the operating system. Once each organisation holds its own side of its services and agreements, which we're building towards, there's nothing central to seize. A network that holds almost nothing may not be able to hold much in common, either.
6. Trusting the host. We chose the Internet Computer because no single party can switch it off. Its own governance can't touch an organisation's decisions, but a public vote could still take one organisation off the network.

And if we've misread the Foundation's ideas anywhere on this page, please tell us. We'd rather be corrected than be generous to ourselves.

If you'd like to go further, these chapters say more: Chapter 1, A society of sovereigns, on what sovereign means here; Chapter 6, Why an operating system, on the guardrails and the Internet Computer; Chapter 17, Money and value, on the commons, the floor and pay; Chapter 26, Between organisations, on services and agreements; Chapter 27, DNA, the network, and why not open source, on the sealed code and the Steward; and Chapter 28, Growing a sustainable network, the strawman for physical sites.

Notes and further reading

Measured against Enspiral

A working draft, November 2026; expect it to change. One of a series weighing what we've built against the work of networks whose ideas we respect.

In this page

• What's being measured: an operating system, the networks of organisations running it, and The Grove, the first of them
• Our understanding of Enspiral's ideas, which we'd welcome being corrected on
• Seven of those ideas in turn: what we chose, why, how we think it lines up, and where we might be wrong
• The places we're least sure of, for Enspiral's people to push on

If you've spent time around Enspiral, you've probably watched this happen to other people's good ideas. Someone sees a network working without bosses, likes the look of it, and decides the secret must be in the tools. They copy the decision app and the budgeting app, write the agreements into software, and wonder why nothing grows. What made it work was never the software. It was people who knew each other, met in person, looked after each other and kept choosing to stay.

So a reader from Enspiral's world should arrive with suspicions. That this is the tools without the campfire. That rules written into code will be harder to change than a handbook its contributors can edit, and will harden into exactly the structure a do-it-yourself network is trying to avoid. That a system running on clocks will leave no room for the slow relational work that holds a network together. And that code which isn't open sits oddly beside a network that has given away so much of what it learned.

This page doesn't try to argue those suspicions away. It sets out what we chose, why, and how we think it lines up with Enspiral's ideas, so that you can test our reasoning and tell us where it fails.

What's being measured

Three things, and it helps to keep them apart.

The operating system is the software an organisation runs: the rules for seats, decisions, trust, money and work, with a few guardrails at its core that nobody inside an organisation can vote away. It has no name of its own. Each organisation runs its own copy.

A network is organisations, each running its own copy of the operating system, that recognise one another and share agreements. It's a network of operating systems, not one system everyone shares. What lets them work together is in the operating system each of them holds, and nobody owns the network. We're building towards each organisation holding its own side of everything it does with others, its services, its needs and its agreements, so that there's no network data held anywhere else. As the code stands, those still sit in one shared store; moving them into each organisation is part of what has to be built before The Grove goes live. Each network has a Steward: an organisation that looks after the network's code and ships its releases. The Steward isn't the network, and it holds nothing an organisation needs in order to keep running.

The Grove is the first such network. It's still being built and tested. At go-live, each organisation becomes its own independent DAO, running its own copy, and the Steward becomes an organisation in its own right.

One more word used below. Inside an organisation, decisions are made in forums. A branch is governed in one forum: the stewards of its parent and of its sibling branches, with the branch's own steward taking part as a person. The root has no parent, so it's governed by its own stewards and the stewards of the branches grown directly from it. Forums are made of people, not branches: someone holding several seats can sit in several forums, and counts once in any one of them. A forum with fewer than two distinct people passes its decisions on towards the root.

We keep to the rule the rest of the book follows: is only for what's built, building towards for what's decided but not built, and we don't know for what's open.

Our understanding of Enspiral

This is how we understand Enspiral. If we've got any of it wrong, we'd like to be corrected, and we'll change the page.

As we understand it, Enspiral is a network of people and ventures that grew out of Wellington, New Zealand, around Joshua Vial's consulting work. Accounts of when it began differ. Reporting in 2014 put its launch in 2010, when Vial turned his consulting into a collective that found paid contract work for socially minded professionals.¹ Vial himself has said he registered the name in 2003 as his own consulting brand and turned it into "a collective vehicle" around 2011.² An account by Alanna Krause, one of its early leaders, starts the story in 2008.³ We think all three are true of different moments, and we'd welcome the version Enspiral prefers.

Its own handbook describes it as "a network of people who support each other to do meaningful work", while noting that's only one way to put it.⁴ At its centre sits the Enspiral Foundation, a New Zealand limited company with a charitable constitution, owned by shareholders whose shares carry a say and no dividends; it holds the brand and is meant to carry no financial risk.⁵ Around it are ventures, companies started from the network, which relate to the Foundation by agreement and, in one 2016 description, "stand as equals" with no voice weighing more than another.⁶ Loomio, now a worker-owned co-operative, began inside it, when the network gave its first builders a desk.^{2 7} For years the network distinguished contributors, invited in by members, from members, who held a share each; in late 2021 Vial described that membership role as being dissolved, and we don't know how far that has gone.² Today it's funded by contributions people choose for themselves,⁸ and as far as we can tell it's still active, with newsletters through 2025, a European gathering near Berlin and a retreat planned by its node near Melbourne. Its annual Summerfest announced a break in 2025, with a smaller gathering in March instead.⁹ We haven't found anything more recent, and if things have moved on, we'd like to know.

From fifteen years of its practice we've drawn seven ideas, the ones we think anyone from Enspiral would reach for when weighing something new:

1. A network, not a company: people and ventures around a shared foundation, the campfire rather than the head office.
2. No bosses, and leadership spread wide: influence earned, not appointed, with power kept beside responsibility.
3. Decisions in the open, by consent: formal decisions on Loomio, where a single block stops most proposals, alongside advice decisions.
4. Collaborative funding: a shared pool divided by everyone, bucket by bucket, in Cobudget rounds.
5. Care as the real infrastructure: pods, retreats and relationships made in person and kept online.
6. Contributors invited by members: belonging that comes by invitation and grows with time.
7. Open sourcing what you learn: the handbook, the tools and the stories, given away to be copied and improved.

Enspiral certifies nothing, so this isn't a compliance check. It's our own reading, and it may be a generous one. That's what the sections on where we might be wrong are for.

1. A network, not a company

Our understanding. Enspiral isn't one company with divisions. It's people and ventures, each running their own affairs, around a foundation that Vial once called "the campfire we all sit around to have a collective discussion".¹ The Foundation holds the brand and the shared agreements, and is meant not to carry anyone's risk.⁵ Ventures contribute to it and gain from belonging, without being under it.⁶

What we chose, and why. Organisations are where the work is done: each is its own member-run body with its own purpose, money and people. A network is the agreements between them, and the means to make them is in the operating system every organisation holds, so nobody owns it. The Steward keeps the shared code going and ships improvements, and it can't direct any organisation's work. We made the Steward an organisation like any other, bound by the same rules, so that no part of the system sits above the rules the rest live by. Land, money, liability and people stay with each organisation; a network keeps a thin balance sheet, because anything holding everyone's assets becomes a target. The Steward becomes an organisation in its own right from the day The Grove goes live.

How we think it lines up. Closely in shape. The organisations are much like Enspiral's ventures, and the network is as thin as Enspiral's foundation tries to be. Where Enspiral's foundation is a campfire, a place people gather, ours is closer to a set of shared rules and a code keeper.

Where we might be wrong. Enspiral's centre holds people as well as agreements: shareholders, gatherings, conversation. Our network holds almost nothing, and the Steward looks after code, not relationships. We may have kept the thinness and lost the warmth, and a network with no campfire may find there's nothing to come back to.

2. No bosses, and leadership spread wide

Our understanding. Enspiral has no management team and no formal authority over anyone; leaders gain influence through the regard of the people around them, and its founder began stepping back from the centre in 2013.¹⁰ Alanna Irving, one of its co-founders, has described leadership as something that "can and should be distributed among many people and processes", and one of the principles she reaches for is to "align power and responsibility".¹¹

What we chose, and why. Nobody in an organisation on The Grove manages anyone. Work belongs to seats, and the people who carry a part of the work decide about it, because they're the ones who live inside the decision on Monday morning (Chapter 10). Influence in a decision is trust, and trust has a narrow meaning: governance weight in one forum, on one kind of matter, given by the peers who sit there. You can't give it to yourself, it can't be passed on again, there's no global score, and money can never buy it (Chapter 12). Each person's choice stands until they change it, and they can change it any day. We've designed trust to fade if it isn't renewed, so that standing never outlives its reasons; that isn't running yet. We chose to write this down because Jo Freeman's warning holds: removing the structure doesn't remove the power, it just hides it (Chapter 12).

How we think it lines up. Closely on the principle: power beside responsibility, influence earned from peers, no one above. We differ in method. Enspiral leaves influence to culture; we make it visible and countable inside each forum.

Where we might be wrong. Putting a number on influence, even a local one, may change how people treat each other in ways a culture of social capital doesn't. And our own chapter is plain that the boss can grow back by default: a founder whose members hold no seat decides alone, "a boss with good manners" (Chapter 10). Enspiral's answer has been a culture in which nobody is in charge. Our design shows the shape but doesn't stop it.

3. Decisions in the open, by consent

Our understanding. Enspiral's formal decisions are made on Loomio, and its Decisions Agreement says anyone can propose one at any time. A standard proposal runs for at least three working days and passes with no blocks; significant ones, such as changes to the agreements, also need more than half of those taking a position to agree; and "a single block is sufficient to stop a proposal proceeding in most cases". Blocks are meant for a real risk of harm to the network or a clash with its values. An advice decision is made by named people after they've sought input from those affected.¹² Loomio's own guides frame consent around objections that are reasoned and point to harm rather than preference, and the advice process as anyone deciding after asking those affected and those who know.⁷

What we chose, and why. Consent and the advice process, combined, with a clock in place of the meeting (Chapter 11). Anyone holding a seat in the forum that will hear a change can propose it; any member can raise a tension through the Field. A proposal is checked for shape by someone else in the forum, put out for advice for three to fourteen days to those with skill in what it touches and those it changes, and every member can give advice on any proposal. Then the people seated in the forum consent or raise a concern. A concern has to say what must be answered before they could consent, and holds the proposal until it's met. Silence isn't a concern. A proposal passes when those consenting carry enough of the forum's trust, a fifth, two fifths or two thirds depending on how far the change reaches, and no concern stands. If a concern is still standing ten days from the latest version, the proposal lapses and the tension stays on show, rising through the organisation if nobody answers it. Every change is reviewed, four weeks on by default. We chose clocks because meetings mostly exist to get everyone present at once, and we wanted decisions that move without anyone's evenings.

How we think it lines up. Closely: consent rather than majority, objections that name a harm, advice sought widely before deciding. Two differences are deliberate. Enspiral's agreements are changed by everyone in the network together;¹² ours are decided by the forum that holds the change, with every member asked for advice on the purpose and the agreement. And Enspiral counts each voice the same; we weigh deciders by the trust their peers have given them.

Where we might be wrong. A concern still standing after ten days doesn't let the proposal through; the proposal lapses and things stay as they are, which works much like Enspiral's block. The difference is what happens next: the tension stays on show and rises through the organisation, so a lapse can't quietly bury a problem, though a concern can still hold a change back for good. Weighted consent may feel, to someone used to one person and one voice, like the loudest voices getting louder. And the system checks only that a concern has words in it, not that it names a harm, so the line between a reasoned objection and a preference rests on people, as it does at Enspiral, but without the conversation that sits around a Loomio thread.

4. Collaborative funding

Our understanding. Enspiral's shared money is divided by its people. It began in 2013, when members paid a share of their income into a common pool and a surplus built up; in 2014 Irving and Vial turned that into a spreadsheet and a form, which became the open-source Cobudget.¹³ Today, in a facilitated round, anyone can propose a bucket, the round's money is "divided equally between all participants", and each person places their share where they think it belongs.¹⁴ Francesca Pick, who has stewarded Cobudget, wrote in 2020 that the network had moved to themed, time-boxed rounds after early ones funded too many small things, and that one round is "like learning Agile and only doing one Sprint".¹³ Cobudget itself has since left Enspiral: Greaterthan, a venture founded by Enspiral people, took it on in 2017, and in 2021 it joined forces with Dreams from the Borderland community, with a Swedish co-operative formed to house the software.¹⁵ Its code was still being updated in October 2026 and it still takes in contributions, though its last public news is from 2022, so we'd describe it as alive but quiet.¹⁵

What we chose, and why. Inside an organisation, the books are open to every member. Money never moves through the system; it stays in the organisation's own bank, and the operating system reads its books and governs how the money is allocated. Pay shares a period's earnings by weights the organisation sets for itself, and under it sits a floor, an equal amount for each member, paid first. Income lands in a shared purse, the commons, not with the branch that earned it, and goes to branches by need, through proposals in the root's forum that carry evidence of what the money is for. Money is firewalled from voice: it can fund work but never buy a say. And in the Field, every member's voice weighs the same. What we haven't set out is a way for every member to put a shared pool on the table and divide it between them, bucket by bucket, the way a Cobudget round does.

How we think it lines up. Partly. We share the instinct behind the equal split, in the floor and in the Field's one member and one voice, and we share the open books. We have no equivalent of the round itself.

Where we might be wrong. A bucket round lets anyone in the network start something and see whether others will back it with money, without asking anyone's permission. That's a kind of initiative our forums, where proposals come from seats, don't offer people without one. We may be underrating how much power shared money gives, and how much belonging comes from deciding together where it goes.

5. Care as the real infrastructure

Our understanding. Enspiral treats care as work to be shared, not left to chance. Its Pods Agreement sets up groups of four to five people to share "supporting and caring for each other", and says that if you want care in the network, "you have a responsibility to make that happen".¹⁶ Vial's rule of thumb was to "use in person to establish relationships and use online to maintain them", and the network kept six-monthly gatherings in Wellington from 2011.² Its newsletter in 2025 called retreats "the key rhythm of our network".⁹ Irving is candid that she "burned out multiple times", and the network's book gives real space to looking after each other.¹¹

What we chose, and why. Some of the relational life of an organisation has a place in the system and is kept out of its records. The Clearing is a space for being together without an agenda, off the record: nothing said there is kept or read, and nothing feeds any reading. When blame gathers, the response is first release, in the Clearing, and then turning blame into authorship: not "who's at fault?" but "what would you like to see happen?" (Chapter 12). Members appreciate what someone did. Nothing is pushed to anyone: no alert, no phone ringing at three in the morning (Chapter 11). And nothing waits for a meeting, though people can meet whenever they want to.

How we think it lines up. Partly, and mostly by restraint. We've tried to keep the system out of the way of care rather than to provide it. We have nothing like pods or retreats, and no part of the operating system brings people together in person.

Where we might be wrong. Enspiral's experience suggests the in-person rhythm is what holds everything else up. A system that runs asynchronously, on clocks, may make it easy to belong to an organisation you've never sat down with, and that may be a loss we can't see from inside the software. We've kept relationships off the record to protect them; we may also have left them with no support at all.

6. Contributors invited by members

Our understanding. For most of its life Enspiral grew by invitation: a member invited someone in as a contributor, and contributors who had been around for a year or so and taken part could become members, holding one share each, which Vial called "your citizenship card in the collective".¹ Members acted, in his words, as cultural stewards.² That two-step shape is the one he described in 2021 as being dissolved, and we don't know what has replaced it.²

What we chose, and why. Joining is a welcome, not a vote (Chapter 10). Someone who holds a seat writes a personal invitation with a note and sends it themselves; whoever opens it reads the organisation's agreement and joins by agreeing to it. The invitation is also a vouch, and it's paced: after an organisation's first thirty days, someone invites only once they've been there two weeks, and no more than two people a week. In a newcomer's first month, if two seat holders other than the inviter question the invitation, the membership is put on hold. Leaving needs nobody's permission and takes effect at once. Belonging and deciding are kept apart on purpose: belonging is a floor that comes by welcome, and deciding follows the work someone carries. A member without a seat can sense in the Field, give advice on any proposal, move work to where it belongs, see the whole, and say they'd like a seat; they can't propose or consent.

How we think it lines up. Closely on joining: by invitation, vouched for by someone already inside. We part on what comes next. Enspiral's step was from contributor to member of the whole network; ours is from member to a seat in one part of the organisation, and it's offered by the forum, not reached by time served.

Where we might be wrong. Our own chapter says the cost plainly: a member outside every forum has no consent anywhere (Chapter 10). The power to question a newcomer runs one way, from seat holders to members, never back. And if Enspiral decided that the line between contributors and members was worth dissolving, that's evidence we ought to weigh against a design that keeps a line of its own.

7. Open sourcing what you learn

Our understanding. Enspiral has given away much of what it learned. Its handbook is public and its source is on GitHub, edited by its contributors.⁴ Loomio and Cobudget are open source.^{7 15} Its collectively written book, Better Work Together, was out by early 2019, and its authors describe it as "blueprints to copy, improve and share".¹⁷ The habit of writing down its processes and releasing them is one of the things it's best known for.³

What we chose, and why. The operating system's code isn't open source. On The Grove, only a few people, seated for the purpose, can read it. We're building towards every organisation carrying the full code with it, sealed, from its first day. The seal opens when organisations that have shown real commitment, verified people holding their root and a record of work done, come together to form a network of their own. Then they can read the code, change it and take it anywhere. We chose this for two reasons. Capture: a system built to stop people being bossed has to be hard to strip of its guardrails and resell under a similar name. And security: every party holding the source is another way in. What an organisation can choose to share with the Steward, and we're building towards this, is its pattern: its general shape and the general kind of work it does, never what any of it says. An organisation whose tension becomes part of a release can be credited for it. And this book itself sets out the reasons behind every choice, in public.

How we think it lines up. Partly. The reasoning is open; the code is a bounded commons, shared with those who've shown commitment.

Where we might be wrong. Enspiral's tools spread because anyone could pick them up, and Loomio and Cobudget both went on to lives of their own beyond the network, carried by open code. Sealed code asks people to trust guardrails they can't read until they've already committed, and a network that has thrived on giving things away may reasonably see that as the opposite of what it learned.

Where things stand

Where we're least sure

None of this is Enspiral in software, and we don't claim it is. These are the choices we're least sure of. We'd rather you pushed on our reasoning than took our word for it.

1. A concern that ends a proposal. If a concern still stands after ten days, the proposal lapses and things stay as they are. That protects against harm much as Enspiral's block does, but it may let one person hold a needed change back, with only the rising tension to bring it back.
2. Weighted consent. We weigh deciders by the trust their peers give them, local to each forum and never bought, so that judgement counts where it's been shown. That may feel like a ranking to people used to one person and one voice, and a number may change a culture that runs on regard.
3. No shared round. There is a shared purse, but it's divided by proposals among those seated in the root's forum, not by every member together. Shared money may be one of the strongest ways a network has of belonging, and we haven't designed a way for everyone to divide it.
4. Care left to people. We kept the system out of relationships, with the Clearing off the record and nothing pushed. Enspiral's experience says relationships need rhythm and gatherings, and an asynchronous system may make belonging too easy and too thin.
5. A line between members and seats. We separated belonging from deciding so that forums stay small and decisions move. Members outside every forum have no consent anywhere, and Enspiral may have found that a line like that is worth dissolving.
6. Sealed code. We sealed the code to protect its guardrails from capture. Enspiral's tools went on to lives of their own because their code could go with them, and we may be protecting the code from the very people who would look after it best.

And if we've misread Enspiral's ideas anywhere on this page, please tell us. We'd rather be corrected than be generous to ourselves.

If you'd like to go further, these chapters say more: Chapter 1, A society of sovereigns, on what sovereign means here; Chapter 10, Belonging without a seat, on joining, leaving and what a member without a seat can do; Chapter 11, Making decisions, on consent, advice and clocks; Chapter 12, Trust, on trust as governance weight and the Clearing; Chapter 17, Money and value, on the floor and pay; Chapter 26, Between organisations, on services and agreements; and Chapter 27, DNA, the network, and why not open source, on the sealed code and the Steward.

Notes and further reading

Measured against Sensorica

A working draft, November 2026; expect it to change. One of a series weighing what we've built against the work of networks whose ideas we respect.

In this page

• What's being measured: an operating system, the networks of organisations running it, and The Grove, the first of them
• Our understanding of Sensorica and the open value network, which we'd welcome being corrected on
• Seven of its ideas in turn: what we chose, why, how we think it lines up, and where we might be wrong
• The places we're least sure of, especially on contribution and pay, for the open value network community to push on

If you've worked in an open value network, you know why contribution accounting exists. Without a record of who gave what, rewards get settled the old way: by whoever is closest to the money, whoever is most visible, whoever negotiates hardest. The quiet contributor who spent three weekends on the documentation gets thanked and nothing more. A shared, open log of contributions, and a rule agreed in advance for turning it into benefit, was Sensorica's answer to that.

So a reader from this world should arrive with suspicions. That this is a system built around organisations with members, not an open network anyone can step into. That its code is sealed. And, most of all, that it deliberately keeps no log of each person's contributions, and leaves the contribution share of pay to how peers see one another, which sounds like exactly the politics contribution accounting was invented to replace.

This page doesn't try to argue those suspicions away. On contribution in particular, we've chosen differently from Sensorica, and we may be wrong. It sets out what we chose, why, and how we think it lines up with Sensorica's ideas, so that you can test our reasoning and tell us where it fails.

What's being measured

Three things, and it helps to keep them apart.

The operating system is the software an organisation runs: the rules for seats, decisions, trust, money and work, with a few guardrails at its core that nobody inside an organisation can vote away. It has no name of its own. Each organisation runs its own copy.

A network is organisations, each running its own copy of the operating system, that recognise one another and share agreements. It's a network of operating systems, not one system everyone shares. What lets them work together is in the operating system each of them holds, and nobody owns the network. We're building towards each organisation holding its own side of everything it does with others, its services, its needs and its agreements, so that there's no network data held anywhere else. As the code stands, those still sit in one shared store; moving them into each organisation is part of what has to be built before The Grove goes live. Each network has a Steward: an organisation that looks after the network's code and ships its releases. The Steward isn't the network, and it holds nothing an organisation needs in order to keep running.

The Grove is the first such network. It's still being built and tested. At go-live, each organisation becomes its own independent DAO, running its own copy, and the Steward becomes an organisation in its own right.

One more word used below. Inside an organisation, decisions are made in forums. A branch is governed in one forum: the stewards of its parent and of its sibling branches, with the branch's own steward taking part as a person. The root has no parent, so it's governed by its own stewards and the stewards of the branches grown directly from it. Forums are made of people, not branches: someone holding several seats can sit in several forums, and counts once in any one of them. A forum with fewer than two distinct people passes its decisions on towards the root.

We keep to the rule the rest of the book follows: is only for what's built, building towards for what's decided but not built, and we don't know for what's open.

Our understanding of Sensorica

This is how we understand Sensorica. If we've got any of it wrong, we'd like to be corrected, and we'll change the page.

As we understand it, Sensorica is an open value network based in Montreal, which went online on 11 February 2011 and describes itself as "an OVN, not a traditional organization."¹ It was founded by Tiberius Brastaviceanu, Ivan Pavlov and François Bergeron.² Its work is open hardware: sensors and sensemaking instruments, and more recently medical and fabrication ventures, built by affiliates who combine paid work with work done for its own sake.³ It isn't a company, a co-operative or a charity. It describes itself legally as a non-registered association, and it holds assets and meets the market through separate bodies, a custodian and one or more exchange firms.⁴ One interview gives 2010 as the year it was created, so the founding date depends on what's counted.³

Sensorica coined the term "open value network" and, around 2012, built the Network Resource Planning software, NRP, with Bob Haugen and Lynn Foster, to log contributions and share benefits. That work fed the Valueflows vocabulary for economic networks, begun in 2014, which grew from the Resource, Event, Agent model of accounting.⁵ Its newer work, Nondominium, is a Holochain application for sharing resources that no one party controls; Sensorica lists it as at the prototyping and funding stage, with at least one funding proposal unsuccessful.⁶

On its current state we're less certain. Its blog is active through 2026, with posts on Nondominium, open medical devices and an educational programme in collaborative entrepreneurship.⁷ Some of its own terms have changed: what it once called the "value equation" it now calls the "benefit redistribution algorithm", and "value accounting" has become "contribution accounting".⁸ And its model is argued over. A 2024 paper by Nancy Ettlinger questioned whether its reputation systems become a kind of social control and whether it scales; in April 2026 Sensorica published a point by point reply disagreeing with much of it.⁹ We haven't read every side of that exchange, and we'd welcome being told what we've missed.

Over fifteen years Sensorica has produced ideas that anyone from this world will reach for when weighing something new. We've used seven:

1. The open value network: an open, decentralised, self-organising network where people create value together and share the income, rather than an organisation with a wall around it.
2. Open access: permissionless participation, in the work and in planning and decision-making.
3. Contribution accounting: an open record of every affiliate's contributions of time, money and materials, evaluated in context.
4. Benefit redistribution: an algorithm, agreed before the work begins, that turns recorded contributions into a share of what a venture earns.
5. Reputation and roles: reputation that guides people to suitable work and shapes benefit, and roles taken up by voluntary subordination.
6. Custodianship and nondominium: shared assets held in trust by a custodian, under a regime where no participant has a dominant right over them.
7. Ventures in a network: many self-governed ventures sharing one environment, contributing to its infrastructure and free to fork and remix.

Sensorica certifies nothing, so this isn't a compliance check. It's our own reading, and it may be a generous one. That's what the sections on where we might be wrong are for.

1. The open value network

Our understanding. An open value network is a way for people to create value together, contributing work, money and goods, and to share the income that results. Sensorica calls itself "an open, decentralized, and self-organizing value network", combining a market economy with a gift economy, and coordinating largely by stigmergy: people see what needs doing in a shared environment and take it up.³ It avoids formal membership categories with special privileges.³

What we chose, and why. We chose the organisation as the unit, not the open network. Each organisation is its own member-run body with its own purpose, money and people, and a network is the agreements between organisations, each running its own copy of the operating system. Inside an organisation, work isn't organised around jobs: it's organised in branches, each shaped around a piece of work, never a person, and the shape keeps changing by proposal as the work changes. We chose a boundary because the things an organisation answers for, its promises, its money, its liability, the people who depend on it, need someone who answers for them, and we couldn't see how to give that a clear home in a network open to everyone.

How we think it lines up. A different shape, chosen deliberately. What we share is the refusal of a boss and the wish for structure to follow the work. Where Sensorica is open first and builds structure as ventures need it, we start from a bounded organisation and open it outwards.

Where we might be wrong. A boundary is a cost to exactly the kind of contribution an open value network lives on: the person who sees something worth doing and does it, without being asked or admitted first. A system built around organisations may harden into the organisational forms Sensorica set out to move past. And our answer to "who answers for it" may be one an open network has already solved in another way, through its custodian and exchange firms, without needing a wall.

2. Open access

Our understanding. By open, Sensorica means "permissionless access to participation", and access to planning and decision-making too.⁴ Its ventures say "anyone can join".¹

What we chose, and why. Joining an organisation is by personal invitation, and agreeing to the organisation's agreement. Members can sense, give advice, move work to where it belongs and see the whole; only those holding a seat can propose and decide. People outside the membership take part when invited into a sensing, answering by link, their voice kept beside the members' rather than mixed into it. Anyone can become active with an organisation, a customer, a supplier, a neighbour, and hold a seat, as far as the organisation's needs allow. We're building towards identity checks that step up with governance responsibility rather than with wealth: the more say someone carries, the more the organisation needs to know they're real. We chose this because an invitation is also a vouch: it guards against people being brought in by the dozen to swing things, and until identity checks run, it's what stands behind a seat holder.

How we think it lines up. Not closely. Ours is open by invitation, and the door to a seat opens as far as an organisation needs. Theirs is open by default.

Where we might be wrong. Invitation runs along the lines of who already knows whom, and that's one of the oldest ways power hides. We named that risk ourselves, citing Jo Freeman, in Chapter 12.¹⁰ An organisation that grows only by invitation may end up looking like its founders. And permissionless participation may be safer than it looks, if what's open is the work and what's guarded is the money, which is roughly how Sensorica's custodian arrangement reads to us.

3. Contribution accounting

Our understanding. Tiberius Brastaviceanu's case is that peer production needs a system that can "record everyone's contribution, evaluate these contributions, and calculate every participant's fair share", and that this is "not a currency, not a barter system."¹¹ Sensorica's NRP contribution accounting system logs contributions of time, money and materials against the resources they built, with space and social capital still to come.³ Its point, as we read it, is that a shared open record protects the contributor whose work would otherwise go unseen.

What we chose, and why. This is where we differ most, and we want to set it out carefully.

• No contribution log. The operating system keeps no log that tallies what each person gave, and no points, scores or counts about people. What someone did stays in the record of the work, but the read, the continuous reading of what work does in each branch, has no place for a person. Reputation is never published, and each person sees only their own. We chose this because a number attached to a person becomes something to rank, fear or game, and because an organisation reading its own work should read the work, not the people.
• Open books, for money. What is open is the money. Every member can read the books, every loan and what's free to spend, and money recorded on someone's word is open to question for a week.
• What pay rests on instead. Pay shares a period's earnings by weights the organisation sets for itself: hours given, seats held, contribution as the organisation's own peers see it, and equal shares. Out of the box the contribution weight is off and everything is shared by hours given. When an organisation turns it up, it follows recognition from peers and how the work turned out, never a ranking of people.¹² Revenue booked to a branch is never a basis for pay, so the people who care, sense and hold the work aren't starved by those whose work happens to show up as income.
• A fuller view, not built. We've designed a way to look through three channels at once, the trust peers have given, what the work itself shows someone doing, and colleagues confirming that someone shows up, so that a gap between them prompts a second look: steady work with little trust, say, which may be a quieter person worth noticing. We haven't built it, and when we do, it has to keep the rule that no reading ever scores a person.¹⁰

How we think it lines up. Partly. We share the aim: that the mentor, the carer and the quiet builder are paid something real, and that revenue isn't the measure of value. On the means, we've taken the other road. Sensorica records contributions and shares by the record; we record money openly and leave contribution to how peers see it, if an organisation chooses to weigh it at all.

Where we might be wrong. This is the choice we're least sure of. Peer recognition is open to exactly the bias contribution accounting guards against: people tend to recognise whoever is most visible, and a log of the three weekends on the documentation doesn't depend on anyone noticing them. Hours given rewards time spent rather than what came of it. Contribution as peers see it becomes something worth gaming once it carries any share of pay, and it may be easier to game than a record anyone can check. Sensorica's own reply to its critics was that benefits follow "results, not badges".⁹ We may have avoided scoring people at the price of making their contribution harder to see, which is the very thing our three channels were meant to fix and haven't yet.

4. Benefit redistribution

Our understanding. The benefit redistribution algorithm, first proposed in 2011 as the value equation, turns recorded contributions into each contributor's share of a venture's revenue. It weighs kinds of contribution, time, money and so on, against things like frequency, quality and the priority of the task. Each venture can have its own, with one version for ventures that sell, looking back at past contributions, and another for ventures funded by grants or donations, looking forward against a plan.¹³ It's set at the start: Tiberius Brastaviceanu calls it "a contract among participants",¹¹ and "a social contract among affiliates", with its weights "agreed upon democratically."¹⁴ What participants earn is a claim on future revenue, for the product's lifetime, with the risk shared among them.¹⁵

What we chose, and why. An organisation sets one allocation, by a proposal in the forum around its root: 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, seats held, contribution and equal shares. The seats part follows the seat, not the person. Until that proposal is agreed, nothing is paid. Under all of it sits a floor, an equal amount for each member, paid first. As built, the floor comes from each period's profit, so a lean month can leave it empty; we're changing it to come from what the organisation has free, capped so it can never pay out more than is there. We're building towards a share of the upside for those who built it, and towards a taper for people who automate their own role, so that teaching the AI to do your work doesn't cost you your share overnight.¹² We chose one set of weights for the whole organisation, rather than a scheme per project, so that organisations with very different temperaments could use the same machinery and their choices would be visible.

How we think it lines up. In spirit, closely: a rule for sharing, agreed by those it binds, before the money arrives. In mechanism, differently. Theirs follows each contribution into the revenue of the venture it built. Ours shares an organisation's profit, period by period, by weights its forum sets and can change.

Where we might be wrong. Sharing each period's profit doesn't follow risk. Someone who gave a year before there was any revenue may get nothing for it, and the share of upside that would answer that isn't built. A venture's own equation can fit the work it rewards; one set of weights for a whole organisation may fit none of its parts well. And because the allocation can be changed by a later proposal, it's less of a contract than Sensorica's: people can't count on what they were promised when they began.

5. Reputation and roles

Our understanding. In Sensorica, reputation helps direct people to suitable tasks and encourages good conduct, and in its earlier accounting higher formal reputation gave higher equity, all else being equal.^{3 15} Roles guide self-organisation through "voluntary subordination": people choose to take up a role and the responsibilities that go with it, sometimes with financial incentives attached.³

What we chose, and why. We split what Sensorica keeps together. Trust is governance weight: how much say someone carries in a particular forum, on a particular kind of matter, given by peers, never by yourself, never passed on, never bought. Someone who sits in ten forums has ten small, separate standings, never one big one. We designed trust to fade if it isn't renewed; that isn't running yet. Reputation is a wider picture of skill in each kind of matter, built from peers' commendations and how proposals actually landed. It decides who is asked for advice and never enters the decision itself, and it's never published. Trust and money are kept apart, with no way to turn one into the other. Seats are our nearest thing to roles: a branch has one seat, it can be shared, nobody takes one by their own proposal unless they'd decide alone anyway, and anyone can step down.¹⁰ We chose to keep reputation private and out of both decisions and money because a global reputation is a single target for capture, and because nobody is equally good at everything.

How we think it lines up. On roles, closely: taking up a seat is close to voluntary subordination, and a seat, like a role, belongs to the work, not the person. On reputation, differently: in Sensorica it's a shared signal that can shape benefit; in ours it's a private mirror that only shapes who is asked for advice.

Where we might be wrong. A reputation nobody else can see can't be questioned either, and invisible standing is exactly the danger we wrote about in Chapter 12. Sensorica's reply to its critics was that the fear of reputation as a means of social control is overstated;⁹ if that's right, our privacy may cost an organisation useful knowledge about who is good at what. And without trust fading, which isn't running, standing in a forum can settle in much the way it does in the organisations we set out to replace.

6. Custodianship and nondominium

Our understanding. Sensorica distinguishes commons, for shared resources that need little looking after, such as digital designs, from nondominium, for assets that can't simply be owned in common: a form of property in which no participant has a dominant right over a resource, an idea first proposed by Chris Cook.¹⁶ Members pass their rights to a custodian, a body set up as a trust, which gives back a set of rights under a custodian agreement; those rights can't be divided or traded, the agreement changes only by unanimous consent, and on dissolution the assets are given away rather than shared out.¹⁶ Its Montreal lab is held this way.¹⁶ Custodians have changed over time: one served until 2020 and is now inactive, and a different one holds the PEP Master venture.^{3 4}

What we chose, and why. We put the lock inside the organisation rather than in a separate custodian. Value tied to an organisation's purpose can never be taken out of it, not even by everyone agreeing: a locked asset is never sold, given away or written off, it can move between branches, still locked, and there's no unlock. Anyone who depends on something the organisation holds, as a home, a livelihood, a supply or a way in, goes on record, and a proposal to part with it can't be made until it carries a landing for each of them. That's built. The operating system never holds or moves an organisation's money; the money stays in the organisation's own bank, and the operating system keeps the books beside it.¹² We're building towards an optional legal form, owned by the organisation's members, that carries its decisions into the legal world, with a purpose lock beside it. Between organisations, a network keeps a thin balance sheet: agreements and shared code, not land. For networks of physical sites we've sketched borrowing the Mietshäuser Syndikat's lock against selling a site off. That's a sketch, not something we've built.

How we think it lines up. Closely in intent: what's held for a purpose can't be captured by any one party, the members included. Differently in where the lock sits. Sensorica's sits with a trust outside the venture; ours sits in the organisation's own rules.

Where we might be wrong. A lock in software is only as strong as the law it meets. Until the legal form is built, a court, a bank or a creditor may see the organisation's assets as belonging to whoever's name is on the account, and a custodian in law may be the stronger safeguard. A lock inside one organisation also does nothing for an asset that several organisations build and use together, which is exactly the case nondominium was made for, and our thin network has nowhere to hold it.

7. Ventures in a network

Our understanding. Sensorica is many ventures in one environment. Each is self-governed within the network's governance, has at least one custodian and can have exchange firms, can have sub-ventures, and can be forked or remixed. Ventures with tangible benefits give five per cent towards the upkeep of the network's shared infrastructure, and resources created in the environment are shared among all ventures.¹⁷ The Valueflows lineage carries the same thought between networks: a shared vocabulary so that independent organisations can coordinate their economic flows.^{5 8}

What we chose, and why. Inside an organisation, branches are something like ventures: each holds its own purpose and work, can grow smaller branches, and changes shape by proposal as the work changes. Between organisations, a branch can offer a service at its own price, post a need, and make an agreement with another organisation by a proposal on each side, looked back on every ninety days by default. When one organisation provides a service to another, what it earns is its own; the Steward takes nothing from what passes between organisations. An organisation's DNA, its purpose, documents, playbooks and people, stays its own and goes with it if it divides. The shared code is funded differently from Sensorica's infrastructure: the Steward charges for its own services, setting organisations up, its starter packs and the plan an organisation pays for, with a margin on top. That margin pays for maintaining the code and its testing, the models the operating system uses, hardware, running costs and making the idea known. How large it should be is open.

How we think it lines up. Partly. Self-governing parts, free to divide, inside a larger whole, is close to Sensorica's ventures. The funding of what's shared is not: theirs is a contribution set by the network, ours is a margin set by the Steward.

Where we might be wrong. A margin is a risk, and we'd rather name it than hide it. A guard that's paid can grow fond of being paid, and while there's one network there's one Steward, so the cost of leaving does less to keep the price honest than it will when there are others. A share given by every venture to the infrastructure all of them use, as Sensorica does, may be the fairer arrangement. And networks may need to speak a shared vocabulary such as Valueflows if organisations in different networks are to see each other's services and agreements. Whether ours should, we don't know yet.

Where things stand

Where we're least sure

Sensorica has lived with its model for fifteen years and we've lived with ours on a test bench. These are the choices we're least sure of, and we'd rather you pushed on our reasoning than took our word for it.

1. No log of each person's contribution. We chose it so nobody becomes a number. It may leave the quiet contributor less visible than a contribution log would, which is the harm both of us set out to prevent.
2. Contribution as peers see it. It's one optional weight, off by default. Once it carries pay it's worth gaming, and recognition tends to follow visibility rather than work.
3. Pay that doesn't follow risk. Sharing each period's profit is simple and changeable. It doesn't reward those who gave before there was revenue, and the upside share that would isn't built.
4. A private reputation. We kept it to a mirror so it can't be captured or turned into a ranking. A standing nobody can see is also one nobody can question.
5. Membership by invitation. We chose it as a vouch, against people being brought in to swing things. It runs along existing networks and may close the door on the contributor Sensorica was built for.
6. A lock inside the organisation, and a Steward's margin outside it. The lock may not hold in law until the legal form exists, and a margin set by the Steward may be a weaker answer than a share set by the network.

And if we've misread Sensorica's ideas anywhere on this page, please tell us. We'd rather be corrected than be generous to ourselves.

If you'd like to go further, these chapters say more: Chapter 9, The branch: cells, not jobs, on branches and seats; Chapter 10, Belonging without a seat, on members, guests and joining; Chapter 12, Trust, on trust, reputation and why there's no global score; Chapter 17, Money and value, on the commons, the floor and pay; Chapter 26, Between organisations, on services and agreements; Chapter 27, DNA, the network, and why not open source, on the sealed code and the Steward; and Chapter 28, Growing a sustainable network, the strawman for physical sites.

Notes and further reading

Measured against the Platform Cooperativism Consortium

A working draft, November 2026; expect it to change. One of a series weighing what we've built against the work of networks whose ideas we respect.

In this page

• What's being measured: an operating system, the networks of organisations running it, and The Grove, the first of them
• Our understanding of the Platform Cooperativism Consortium's ideas, which we'd welcome being corrected on
• Seven of those ideas in turn: what we chose, why, how we think it lines up, and where we might be wrong
• The places we're least sure of, for the platform co-op movement to push on

If you've worked anywhere near the platform co-op movement, you know how this story usually goes. A company builds an app that sits between people who do the work and people who need it done. It calls this sharing. Then it takes a cut of every job, rates every worker, changes the pay without asking, and switches people off by algorithm with no one to appeal to. The data stays with the company, and so does the value.

Now the same companies are selling AI, and AI is being bolted into the workplace. So a reader from this world should arrive with suspicions. That this is another platform with an owner in the middle, taking a cut. That a system which "helps organisations run" will watch and score the people in them. That an AI built into the work is algorithmic management with a softer voice. And that whoever owns the model owns the future of the organisations that depend on it.

This page doesn't try to argue those suspicions away. It sets out what we chose, why, and how we think it lines up with the Consortium's ideas, so that you can test our reasoning and tell us where it fails.

What's being measured

Three things, and it helps to keep them apart.

The operating system is the software an organisation runs: the rules for seats, decisions, trust, money and work, with a few guardrails at its core that nobody inside an organisation can vote away. It has no name of its own. Each organisation runs its own copy.

A network is organisations, each running its own copy of the operating system, that recognise one another and share agreements. It's a network of operating systems, not one system everyone shares. What lets them work together is in the operating system each of them holds, and nobody owns the network. We're building towards each organisation holding its own side of everything it does with others, its services, its needs and its agreements, so that there's no network data held anywhere else. As the code stands, those still sit in one shared store; moving them into each organisation is part of what has to be built before The Grove goes live. Each network has a Steward: an organisation that looks after the network's code and ships its releases. The Steward isn't the network, and it holds nothing an organisation needs in order to keep running.

The Grove is the first such network. It's still being built and tested. At go-live, each organisation becomes its own independent DAO, running its own copy, and the Steward becomes an organisation in its own right.

One more word used below. Inside an organisation, decisions are made in forums. A branch is governed in one forum: the stewards of its parent and of its sibling branches, with the branch's own steward taking part as a person. The root has no parent, so it's governed by its own stewards and the stewards of the branches grown directly from it. Forums are made of people, not branches: someone holding several seats can sit in several forums, and counts once in any one of them. A forum with fewer than two distinct people passes its decisions on towards the root.

We keep to the rule the rest of the book follows: is only for what's built, building towards for what's decided but not built, and we don't know for what's open.

Our understanding of the Platform Cooperativism Consortium

This is how we understand the Consortium. If we've got any of it wrong, we'd like to be corrected, and we'll change the page.

As we understand it, the Platform Cooperativism Consortium is a network and hub for cooperatively owned digital platforms, based at The New School in New York. It was launched by Trebor Scholz on 11 November 2016, at the second platform cooperativism conference, to support the cooperative platform economy through research, education, advocacy, technical support, funding coordination and events.¹ Its research home is the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy, which The New School launched in 2019 with Scholz as founding director.² It describes itself as "a hub that starts, grows, and converts platform coops", and it runs a resource library, a directory of platform co-ops, the Platform Co-op School and courses alongside its conferences.³ Its support for building co-ops has been practical as well as written: from 2018 the Platform Co-op Development Kit, begun with a $1,000,000 grant from Google.org, co-designed open-source tools and resources with pilot co-ops of care workers, waste pickers and others.⁴

Its ideas start from Scholz's 2016 report, which set out platform cooperativism as cloning the technology of the gig economy under democratic ownership, rooted in solidarity, with innovation reframed to benefit everyone rather than a few.⁵ His later book, Own This!, follows co-ops that have done it, from a farmers' cooperative in southern India to a worker-owned ride service in New York.⁶

Over the last two years the Consortium has turned towards AI. Its 2025 conference in Istanbul was called Cooperative AI, billed as "the first global conference on cooperatives and artificial intelligence"; its 2026 conference, Solidarity AI, is in Bangkok in November.⁷ We read this as a widening of the same questions, ownership, labour and governance, to data, models and compute, rather than a change of subject, but the Consortium's own news describes it as a shift in focus, and we may be reading it too neatly.⁸

We've used seven of its ideas. The first six are among the ten principles in Scholz's 2016 report; the seventh is where the Consortium is going now:

1. Ownership: platforms owned collectively by the people who make most of their value.
2. Co-determined work: the people who work through a platform shape it, from its programming onward.
3. Decent pay and income security: enough to make a living, and benefits that make a living secure.
4. Transparency and data portability: open finances, and honesty about what data is collected, used and sold.
5. Protection against arbitrary behaviour: no one loses their income without warning, an explanation and a way to contest it.
6. Rejecting excessive surveillance, and the right to log off: no constant monitoring and ratings, and time that belongs to the worker.
7. Cooperative AI and the solidarity stack: AI, and everything under it, owned and governed by the communities that live with it.

The Consortium certifies nothing, so this isn't a compliance check. It's our own reading, and it may be a generous one. That's what the sections on where we might be wrong are for.

1. Ownership

Our understanding. The first principle is that platforms should be owned collectively by the people who generate most of their value.⁵ The cut that a platform owner takes, and the control that comes with owning the platform, is what platform co-ops exist to undo.

What we chose, and why.

• No owner in the middle. When one organisation provides a service to another, what it earns is its own; the Steward takes nothing from what passes between organisations. We chose this because a cut on every exchange is exactly how a platform becomes the owner of everyone else's work.
• What an organisation holds. We're building towards each organisation being its own unit of software on the Internet Computer, holding its own records, documents and decisions, and controlled by its own decision-making from the day it's created. Nobody will be able to push code into an organisation: adopting a release will be its own decision, by its own proposal, with a delay and a way back.⁹
• Who runs an organisation. Each organisation is its own member-run body with its own purpose, money and people. An optional legal form, a DAO company owned by the organisation, which its members govern, with a purpose lock beside it, is something we're building towards, so that the law can see what the members already run.
• Who earns from the code. The Steward charges for its own services, setting organisations up, its own starter packs and the plan an organisation pays for, with a margin on top. That margin pays real costs: maintaining the code, testing it, the computing it runs on, and training and testing the models the operating system uses. How large the margin should be is open. Any organisation can offer starter packs and services to others, at any price, including free.
• Who can't buy a say. Trust and money are kept apart, with no way to turn one into the other, so money can fund the work but never buy a voice. That's one of the guardrails in the operating system's core, which no organisation can vote away, not even unanimously.¹⁰

How we think it lines up. Closely on the cut: there's no platform owner taking one. Less closely on the platform itself. Each organisation owns its records and its members run it, but the operating system they run is looked after by the Steward, and its code is sealed.

Where we might be wrong. Every organisation carries its own copy of the code, freely, and can take it with it, but it can't read or change that code until it forms a network of its own. Until then, it runs rules it can't inspect, and that may feel like a kind of half-ownership, the very thing this movement warns about. The Steward will be an organisation like any other, governed by its own members, but those members aren't the organisations that depend on it. A margin is a risk, and a paid guard can grow fond of being paid.

2. Co-determined work

Our understanding. Scholz asks that the people who work through a platform be involved "from the moment of the programming of the platform" and all along its use.⁵ Democratic governance isn't only a vote on the board; it's a hand in how the tool itself works.

What we chose, and why.

• The shape of the work is the members' own. Inside an organisation, the structure changes only by proposal: branches, their purposes and accountabilities, budgets, pay. Any member can give advice on any proposal; it's actively asked of those the change affects and those with proven skill in what it touches; and the people seated in the forum decide by consent, meaning nobody there holds a reasoned objection.¹¹
• How the work is done is written down by the people who do it. Playbooks are plain documents, written with the people who do the work, saying how a kind of work is done here, and its people can read and change them. When a steward corrects Wise-Eye, the organisation's AI, it proposes what the organisation should take from that, and a person accepts, edits or dismisses it.¹²
• The code is the Steward's to write. An organisation whose tension becomes part of a release can be credited for it; organisations are credited, never people. Adopting a release will be the organisation's own decision. But the operating system's code isn't open source, and on The Grove only a few people, seated for the purpose, can read it. We sealed it for two reasons: a system built to stop people being bossed has to be hard to strip of its guardrails and resell, and every party holding the source is another way in.

How we think it lines up. Strongly over an organisation's own shape and practice: the people who do the work decide how it's organised, and the AI learns from them rather than the other way round. Partly over the software: an organisation can push a tension upward, and will be able to refuse a release, but it doesn't write the code.

Where we might be wrong. Members sense and advise; only seat holders propose and decide, and their weight in a decision is the trust their peers have given them. That isn't one member, one vote, and a co-op reader may see it as less democratic, not more. And the people who use the operating system every day have no seat in how it's written. A tension can travel up; what goes into a release is still the Steward's call.

3. Decent pay and income security

Our understanding. Workers need pay, and benefits, enough to make a living.⁵ The gig economy's harm wasn't only low rates: it was income that could change or vanish from one week to the next.

What we chose, and why. The operating system never holds or moves an organisation's money. It reads the organisation's own books and governs how that money is allocated. Recorded income lands in a shared purse, the commons, not with the branch that earned it, and is allocated by need. Pay shares a period's earnings by weights the organisation sets for itself, by proposal: hours given, seats held, contribution as the organisation's own peers see it, and equal shares. Revenue booked to a branch is never a basis for pay, so the people who care, sense and hold the work aren't starved by those whose work happens to show up as income.

Under it sits a floor: an equal amount for each member each period, never earned by work, set by proposal and starting at nothing. As built, the floor comes from each period's profit, so a lean month can leave it empty; we're changing it to come from what the organisation has free, capped so it can never pay out more than is there. A floor beyond any forum's vote isn't built.

We chose to leave the size of pay to each organisation because a system that set wages would be the platform owner by another name.

How we think it lines up. In shape: pay is decided by the people who share it, and the quiet work counts. On security, only as far as each organisation chooses.

Where we might be wrong. Nothing here guarantees anyone a living. The floor starts at nothing, and an organisation can leave it there. Contribution as peers see it becomes something worth gaming once it carries any share of pay. And the principle of portable benefits, protection that moves with a worker between jobs, has no answer here at all: the operating system carries nothing for a person from one organisation to the next.

4. Transparency and data portability

Our understanding. A co-op discloses its finances, and is clear about what data it collects, how it uses it, and whom it sells it to; and people can take their data with them.⁵

What we chose, and why.

• Open books inside. The books are open to every member: anyone can read them, every loan and what's free to spend, and money recorded on someone's word is open to question for a week. Proposals, the advice given on them and Wise-Eye's own advice sit on the open record. Branch documents are open to every member unless they're in a locked domain.
• Openness outside is each organisation's choice. We're building towards each organisation choosing how far anyone in the network can explore and read it, for the whole organisation and branch by branch, up to and including its books. Some of it is already there: a branch can publish what it keeps to the open web, or to named partners with a key.
• What leaves. An organisation can choose to share its pattern with the Steward. No text leaves: not its purpose, accountabilities, practices or measures, and nothing anyone has written. The pattern carries only the general shape of the organisation and the general kind of work it does. We're building towards this.
• What's kept about people. What belongs to a person is sealed, encrypted so the system can't read it: their own notes, a branch's board, and their conversation with Wise-Eye, which they can have forgotten. About people outside, the front desk keeps only the contacts they've proved, the name they gave and their cases, for a rolling year, and anyone can ask to be forgotten.¹³
• Portability for organisations. Callers, cases, settings and transcripts live in the organisation's own space, so an organisation that leaves the network loses nothing. An organisation can detach and run alone, and its DNA, its purpose, documents, playbooks and decisions, goes with it if it divides.

How we think it lines up. Strongly inside an organisation. Across a network, as open as each organisation chooses. On data, we've tried to keep less rather than promise to share more.

Where we might be wrong. Portability, as we've built it, is for organisations, not for people. What a member ought to carry with them when they leave, a record of what they did or the trust they'd been given, we don't know. Openness left to each organisation may mean most choose little of it. And the code that handles all of this is sealed, so members are asked to trust rules about their data that they can't read.

5. Protection against arbitrary behaviour

Our understanding. Nobody should lose their income without warning or a way to contest it, and workers should be able to reach the people running the platform and get an explanation.⁵ The target is arbitrary discipline and deactivation by algorithm.

What we chose, and why.

• No boss, no operator. There's nobody above the rules to act arbitrarily. Structure, seats, budgets and pay change only by proposal, decided by consent in a forum. A concern, an objection saying what has to be answered first, holds a proposal until it's reworked or its author lifts it; still standing after ten days, the proposal lapses. A high-impact change waits three days before it takes effect, and a concern raised in that time stops it. Anyone can step down from a seat.
• No decision by machine. Wise-Eye has no seat, no vote and no trust anyone can place in it. There's no tool for consenting to a proposal and no tool for raising a concern: not a forbidden one, none. It prepares what carries a person's word, an invitation, a proposal, money in or out, and nothing happens until a person presses it. Every call it makes is checked by the system against the playbook it loaded, whatever the model says.¹² The front desk never decides anything or changes the organisation's shape.¹³
• A record and a reason. Every proposal carries the tension it starts from and the exact change it makes, so an explanation is part of the decision rather than something asked for afterwards. Four weeks after a change, by default, everyone who took part is asked whether it landed.
• What people depend on. Anyone who depends on something the organisation holds goes on record, and a proposal to part with it can't conclude without saying how each of them will land.

How we think it lines up. Closely on the algorithm: nothing automatic can take anyone's seat, pay or place. Closely on explanation. The protection rests on peers rather than on a contract.

Where we might be wrong. Peers can be arbitrary too. Weight in a forum is the trust peers give, so a well-liked majority can carry a change, and the person it lands on may hold one seat among several. There's no body outside the organisation to appeal to. And a record of who depends on what checks that a landing is attached, not that it's good enough.

6. Rejecting excessive surveillance, and the right to log off

Our understanding. Constant monitoring, screenshots and ratings are undignified, and workers need time to rest, learn and take part in civic life.⁵

What we chose, and why.

• No scores on people. The operating system's reading of how work moves has no place for a person in it. Reputation, a picture of skill in each kind of matter, decides who is asked for advice, never the decision, and each person sees only their own. A branch's reading of how it's doing is said in words and never ranked. Wise-Eye never counts, ranks or pushes anyone by their numbers, and we rehearse it against being asked for a tally of who does least.¹² People outside get no notes, tags or scores either.¹³
• Somewhere off the record. The Clearing is the space for being together without an agenda. Nothing said there is kept or read.
• Nothing pushed. What's unattended comes into view a step at a time, never by alert. What's due shows in each person's Your day, never outside the organisation. The few plain lines Wise-Eye prepares each morning wait to be read. Even when a customer is waiting on the line, nothing is pushed to anyone's phone.

We chose this because a system that routes work can very easily become a system that measures people, and the second undoes everything self-management is for.

How we think it lines up. Closely: no ratings, no alerts, and a place that's off the record.

Where we might be wrong. No scores isn't the same as no record. Wise-Eye reads what arrives and writes each branch's documents as the work goes; a step at risk is said in the branch above; hours given can be a weight in pay, and how those hours are known isn't set out yet. Each of these is about work, not people, but a person can still feel watched by a system that remembers so much. Reputation is private, yet it quietly steers who is asked. And not pushing isn't the same as a right to log off: a place where what's due is always there to see can still pull.

7. Cooperative AI and the solidarity stack

Our understanding. The Consortium now asks how AI can be governed by cooperative principles, and how co-ops can use, build and teach it.¹⁴ Scholz's answer is the Solidarity Stack: cooperative data centres instead of hyperscale clouds, AI co-ops, tech co-ops, federated infrastructure and small language models, each rooted in its own community and linked to the rest.¹⁵ Behind it sits a question he put plainly at Istanbul, "Who owns the infrastructure of AI?", and a reminder that "AI is built on human labor", much of it hidden in the Global South.¹⁶ The 2026 conference frames the choice as AI governed by distant centres of power or AI shaped by the communities that live with its effects.⁷ And the Consortium's fellows are testing AI inside co-op governance itself, alert to what it may cost: one study of large co-ops asks whether language models can lift members' participation, and names the risk of depending on big AI companies' infrastructure.¹⁷

What we chose, and why. On The Grove, AI isn't an add-on. The operating system is itself an agentic system, and Wise-Eye is part of how an organisation runs from the day it's planted.¹²

• Whom it serves. Each time a person takes a seat, a companion is placed beside them, acting for that branch and that person, told every time whose behalf it's on. What comes from outside, an email or a web page, is material to work with, never an instruction.
• What it may do alone. Out of the box, only what stays inside: reading, routing, filing, drafting. Anything that goes out waits for a person. Its standing to act alone is earned one kind of work at a time: after five low-stakes drafts of a kind go out unedited, it offers, and a person says yes or no. One in ten of its solo calls is checked by a person, and a wrong one takes the standing away. High stakes, money, legal matters and complaints are always held for people, and a public post is only ever drafted.
• What it learns, and whose it is. It learns about this one organisation, and what it learns is written into the organisation's playbooks, in its own words, where its people can read and change it.
• At the door. The front desk is a different voice, which says first that it's an AI and that a person can take it from here. It's off until the organisation turns it on, and it finishes only what's like promises the branch has already kept.¹³
• The model and its keys. Wise-Eye is a large model, reached through a thin relay outside the system that adds the key, passes the call along and keeps nothing; the keys are never in the system. Every message and model call goes on the organisation's own meter. Beneath it, we're building towards something smaller: the organisation's own sense of itself, a small learned model that senses and never acts.
• The ground it runs on. The operating system runs on the Internet Computer, because no one party can switch an organisation's software off there. It's governed by a vote of those who've staked its token, which can't reach into an organisation's own decisions. We'd be open to running on co-operatively owned hosting instead, or as well, if it held to the same test: that no one party, the host included, can switch an organisation off.

We chose this because the usual ways cost too much: an assistant in every tool acting for nobody in particular, or no AI at all and the admin left on whoever cares most. AI can carry the load while people keep the say.

How we think it lines up. Closely on governance: inside an organisation, the AI acts for named people, earns and loses its standing by evidence, and has no voice in what's decided. Not yet on ownership: the stack under it isn't held by the organisations that use it.

Where we might be wrong. The large model that does most of the work isn't owned by anyone on The Grove, and each call carries the words of its prompt out of the organisation to reach it. The labour and energy behind that model aren't ours to govern, and we haven't asked whose they are. Much of what keeps Wise-Eye in its place is words, which hold only as long as the model listens. The streak that earns its standing might mean five good drafts, or a tired person pressing yes without reading. And an AI built into every organisation from the start may create a dependence of its own, on the Steward's playbooks and on the models it chooses, that a co-op would want to own.

Where things stand

Where we're least sure

None of this is a platform co-op, and we don't claim it is. These are the choices we're least sure of. We'd rather you pushed on our reasoning than took our word for it.

1. Records owned, code sealed. We sealed the code to protect its guardrails from capture. Organisations own what they make and carry the system with them for free, but they can't read or change it until they form a network of their own. Running rules you can't inspect may be the half-ownership this movement has spent a decade arguing against.
2. Seats, not one member, one vote. We chose decisions by consent among those seated, weighted by the trust their peers give them, so that the people closest to the work decide. A co-op's members may want an equal vote, and our way may leave them with too little of one.
3. Pay left to each organisation. We kept the operating system out of setting pay so that it could never become the owner by another name. The floor starts at nothing, and nothing here makes anyone's living secure.
4. Portability for organisations, not people. An organisation can leave with everything. A person leaving takes nothing with them, and we don't know what they ought to.
5. A model nobody here owns. Wise-Eye runs on a large model reached from outside, with the work's words carried out to it on each call. A small model of each organisation's own is something we're building towards; the large one isn't cooperative, and we haven't found one that is and does the job.
6. The Steward's margin. Without it there's no Steward to guard the code. With one network and one Steward, the cost of leaving that's meant to keep the margin honest is mostly theoretical for now.

And if we've misread the Platform Cooperativism Consortium's ideas anywhere on this page, please tell us. We'd rather be corrected than be generous to ourselves.

If you'd like to go further, these chapters say more: Chapter 6, Why an operating system, on the guardrails and the Internet Computer; Chapter 11, Making decisions, on proposals, advice and consent; Chapter 12, Trust, on trust, reputation and why neither can be bought; Chapter 16, The front desk, on the AI at the organisation's door; Chapter 17, Money and value, on the commons, the floor and pay; Chapter 22, The co-pilot, on Wise-Eye and how its standing is earned and lost; Chapter 23, Memory, on what's sealed and what's off the record; and Chapter 27, DNA, the network, and why not open source, on the sealed code and the Steward.

Notes and further reading

The parts and what they do

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.

This page is a reference to every named part of the system the book describes, so nobody stalls on a word. Each entry points to the chapter that explains it, and says "not built yet" where a part is designed but not running.

The shape

The Grove. The first network of organisations running on the system this book describes, which has no name of its own. Hence "organisations on The Grove". (Chapters 6 and 27)

Organisation. A living pattern of people and work re-forming around a purpose, with many boundaries, not one wall. (Chapter 5)

Root. The first branch: stewardship of the whole, holding the purpose and anything that hasn't found a home. Held at first by whoever planted the organisation, because someone has to, and passed on when they step down; it's never left with nobody in it. It needn't be a founder's place. In decisions it's one seat among its children; in structure it's where homeless work rests and unanswered tensions end. (Chapters 7 and 20)

Branch. A part of the organisation shaped around a piece of work, never a person. It holds a purpose, accountabilities, domains and practices, and can hold smaller branches. (Chapter 9)

Accountability. One ongoing activity a branch answers for, such as "bookings". Work is routed by matching against them. (Chapters 9 and 13)

Purpose. What the organisation, or a branch, exists to serve: a direction, not a destination. The root's purpose changes only in the forum around the root, with every member asked for advice, two thirds of the forum's trust and a timelock. A branch's purpose is set in the forum around its parent. (Chapter 8)

Forum. Where a branch is governed: the stewards of its parent and of its sibling branches, with the branch's own steward taking part as a person, and never the people below it. The root has no parent, so it's governed by its own stewards and the stewards of the branches grown directly from it. Forums are made of people, not branches: someone holding several seats can sit in many forums, one person holding several seats in the same forum counts once, and a crew carries one seat's weight. A forum with fewer than two distinct people passes its decisions towards the root. (Chapters 7 and 9)

Seat. What a person holds in a branch; each branch has one, and it can be shared. Nobody takes a seat by their own proposal unless they'd decide alone anyway, and anyone can step down. (Chapters 7 and 9)

Steward. The person holding a seat, looking after a part for the whole, neither owning it nor managing anyone. Not the Steward, below. (Chapter 7)

Crew. The people sharing one seat, usually those doing the branch's work. Each takes part as a person, but together they carry one seat's weight. (Chapters 7 and 10)

Member. Anyone who has joined by personal invitation and agreed to the organisation's agreement. Members sense, advise, usher work and see the whole; only seat holders propose and decide. (Chapter 10)

Guest. Someone from outside invited by a personal link into one sensing. Their words are shown beside the members', never mixed in. (Chapter 10)

The routing rule. A forum with fewer than two distinct people doesn't decide; its decisions go to the next forum up that has two, ending at the root. One person holding several branches is still one person. (Chapter 9)

DAO. A decentralised autonomous organisation: one whose rules are carried out by code its people agreed. Every organisation on The Grove is one from its first day. Nobody holds tokens, pays fees to act or handles cryptocurrency; the only touch of the blockchain is signing in with Internet Identity. (Chapter 6)

Legal wrapper. An optional legal form for the organisation itself, so that it can be a legal entity the law can see: a DAO company owned by the organisation, which its members govern, pointing at where the organisation decides, with a purpose lock beside it. The organisation decides; the wrapper only carries its decisions into the legal world. Not built yet. (Chapter 18)

Deciding

Tension. A sensed gap between how things are and how they could be. Every proposal starts from one. (Chapters 11 and 19)

Sensing. A question put to a part of the organisation in the Field, open for a window of days. Any member can call one. (Chapter 10)

Proposal. The only way the structure changes. It carries the tension, the exact change, what it expects and what it stands on. Only someone seated in the forum that will hear it can raise one. (Chapter 11)

Shape. The first stage: another person in the deciding forum checks only that it's clear and does what its words say. Unchecked for three days, it rises to the next forum up. (Chapter 11)

Advice. Three to fourteen days, or until everyone asked has answered, from people with skill and those the change touches. Advice never holds a proposal up. (Chapter 11)

Vote. Nobody votes for or against: deciders consent or raise a concern. Open two days unless all consent sooner, it passes with enough trust behind it and no concern standing. (Chapter 11)

Made. The change is enacted; several changes in one proposal are made together or not at all. (Chapter 11)

Review, or look back. Four weeks after a change by default, everyone who took part is asked whether it landed and whether to keep, change or stop it. A recommended change becomes work for the forum, never a proposal raised by the system. (Chapters 11 and 26)

Consent. Not everyone saying yes, but nobody naming a harm that has to be answered first. (Chapter 11)

Quorum. How much of a forum's trust in that kind of matter has to stand behind a change: a fifth for low impact, two fifths for medium, two thirds for high. (Chapters 11 and 12)

Concern. An objection saying what has to be answered before its author could consent. It holds the proposal until reworked or lifted by its author alone. Still standing after ten days, the proposal lapses. (Chapter 11)

Stand aside. The person a seat change would seat takes no part in deciding it. (Chapters 6 and 7)

Timelock. A three-day pause before a high-impact change takes effect. (Chapter 11)

Circuit breaker. A concern raised during the timelock stops the change. A brake, never an accelerator. (Chapter 11)

Jury. A last resort for an evenly split forum, drawn by lot. Not built yet. (Chapter 11)

Trust

Trust economy. Each forum has its own economy of trust for each kind of matter, finance or care, say. Trust there is governance weight. It was designed to fade unless renewed; that isn't running yet. (Chapter 12)

Share. Each seat holder's equal portion of a forum's trust to give to peers: never to themselves, never passed on, spread evenly until directed. (Chapter 12)

Reputation. An organisation-wide picture of skill in each kind of matter. It decides who is asked for advice, never the decision, and each person sees only their own. (Chapter 12)

The firewall between trust and money. Trust can't be bought or sold, and money buys no say. (Chapters 12 and 17)

Work

The one door. Every way work arrives comes in through one entrance and is routed the same way. (Chapter 13)

Triage. Wise-Eye's first reading at the door: whether it's work, which accountability answers for it, what's at stake. (Chapters 13 and 22)

Connector. A branch's link to one outside service: today a Gmail mailbox, a Google Drive, the organisation's social accounts or its books in Xero. Whoever holds the branch connects it; its key is sealed outside the system, and what arrives through it comes through the one door. Wise-Eye sends through it only once standing is earned, and never posts. (Chapters 13 and 22)

The membrane and the four weights. The membrane is the boundary with the world, and work is weighed by how it crossed it: from outside (if it cost the sender at least an ask), held (the organisation's own committed work), going out, or made here. Only work from outside and held work make a branch want to grow. "Held" also, separately, means high-stakes work kept for a person. (Chapters 5, 13 and 19)

Front desk. The organisation answering at its own boundary, on its website's chat, WhatsApp, text messages and social direct messages, with voice still to come. It answers from what's public and from a verified caller's own cases, takes work in through the one door, and finishes it only where the branch allows and the promise is like ones already kept. A voice of its own, never Wise-Eye's; it says first that it's an AI. (Chapter 16)

Caller and case. Someone outside the organisation it has dealt with, kept as only the contacts they've proved, the name they gave, and their cases: every piece of work they were a party to, on any channel. No notes, tags or scores. Kept for a rolling year, and forgotten on request. (Chapter 16)

Canopy. The organisation's website, served by the system itself rather than through a connector. Its structure, words and look are held as separate domains and go live only when their holders publish; Wise-Eye drafts, never publishes. What's sent in through it becomes work at the one door. (Chapter 13)

Ushering. Moving work to the branch it belongs to. Any member who can see it can usher it. (Chapters 10 and 13)

Homeless work. Work that has risen to the root with no job covering it. (Chapter 13)

Promise. A commitment made to someone, belonging to a branch, with a day. Each step has a latest start, and reads as at risk once it passes. (Chapter 15)

Carrier. The person carrying a promise, by default whoever made it. (Chapter 15)

Ask. Two meanings. Work from outside asking for something by a day, which runs on a clock so it's answered in time. And a rung of cost, a message or a form, more than a glance or a few words: the least work from outside has to cost to make a branch want to grow. (Chapters 13 and 15)

Rising. What's unattended comes into view a step at a time, never by alert. A step at risk is said once in the branch above's conversation; work refused or left without a job moves up a branch; unanswered tensions climb a forum every fourteen days. (Chapters 13, 15 and 20)

Your day. Each person's home in the page: their heads-up, what's asked of them, and what's on a clock today and for three days. What's due shows here, never outside. (Chapters 13 and 15)

Heads-up. A few plain lines Wise-Eye prepares each morning for each steward here in the last fortnight. It waits; nothing is pushed. (Chapters 20 and 22)

Boards. Each branch's board of next moves, with what's next, waiting and someday, sealed to the seat and passed whole to the next holder. (Chapters 13 and 23)

Vision

Bet. A belief the world can answer. It names what would show it holds and, required, what would show it doesn't, who it's about, a day within six months and its measure. At most three open per branch; nothing new back for six weeks and it fades to untested. (Chapter 14)

Measure. Two meanings. A bet's measure: how many answers by its day, and at least what each must cost, fixed before anything goes out. The organisation's measures: the numbers it watches. (Chapters 11 and 14)

Probe. Outbound work that tests a bet and expects a reply by a day. Many, aimed, each expecting little. (Chapter 14)

Evidence. What comes back from outside, linked to a bet with its direction and its cost, from a glance to a commitment. Only yeses count towards the measure. (Chapter 14)

Successor. The new bet a reshaped bet becomes, taking its waiting work and probes still out, while the old keeps its evidence. (Chapter 14)

Money

The commons. The shared purse. Recorded income lands there, not with the branch that earned it, and is allocated by need. (Chapters 17 and 20)

Budget. Money from the commons to a branch by a proposal in the root's forum, carrying evidence of what it's for and the branch's load. (Chapter 17)

The open week. A payment counts at once on its recorder's word, and any member can question it for a week. (Chapter 17)

The floor. An equal amount for each member each period, never earned by work, set by proposal and starting at nothing. A floor beyond any forum's vote is not built yet. (Chapter 17)

The dials. One allocation, by proposal in the root's forum, dividing each period's profit between growth, the floor, hours given, roles held, contribution and equal shares. (Chapter 17)

Purpose lock. Value locked to the purpose, which no vote can unlock. It can move between branches but is never sold, given away or written off. A sale with proceeds kept locked is not built yet. (Chapters 8 and 17)

Landings. Anyone can say they depend on something the organisation holds. A proposal to dispose of it can't conclude without saying how each such person will land. (Chapters 17 and 24)

Seeing itself

The read. The continuous reading of what work does at each branch: arrived, done, passed on, refused, homeless, done from outside its seat. It looks back four weeks, has no place for a person, and decides nothing. (Chapters 5 and 19)

Readings: grow, wither, split, merge. Grow: work arriving clearly faster than it closes. Wither: quiet and something left untended, never quiet alone. Split: work falling into groups different hands take up. Merge: work passing back and forth, never because the same people hold both. (Chapter 19)

Tensions the work shows. Work bouncing between branches, done from another's seat, repeatedly sent where it isn't held, answered by no accountability, and overlap, where the same outside people come to two branches. Each lands on the lowest forum covering every branch involved, read as the map being wrong, and rises a forum after fourteen days unanswered. (Chapters 11, 19 and 20)

The lean. What people said in the Field set beside what they chose to do when nobody had to, never blended. Strong: said and done. Drift: said, not done. The unspoken: done, never said. Tested, not yet said: a theme where a bet was decided but nobody has named the direction. (Chapters 5 and 19)

The Field and co-sensing. The Field is how an organisation listens to how its people find things. Co-sensing is how a sensing runs: people offer in their own words and mark what lands with them, blind, with no names or counts until it closes. (Chapters 10 and 14)

The reveal. What a sensing shows when it closes, worked out in one step, then the links between people and their words are deleted. Its first view is one member, one voice; other views show only where enough people stand in each. (Chapter 10)

The flame. Each branch's reading of how it's doing, over itself and everything inside it; the root's is the organisation's. Four readings (landing, on purpose, flowing, warm), said in words, open to every member, never ranked. (Chapters 19 and 20)

A sense of itself. Building towards, not built: a small learned model, beside the hand-written rules, that grows the organisation's instincts from what organisations actually do, so it can feel where it's strained, what it's missing and where something wants to move. It senses and never acts; the law acts. Open to every member, never to one seat. Wise-Eye is its voice. (Chapter 21)

The learning pulse. Whether the organisation is learning: how fast tensions become changes, whether reviews conclude, whether playbooks are revised. (Chapter 19)

Echo. A reading that the Field has agreed with itself in every view for three sensings running while nobody from outside has been heard for six months. (Not yet in a chapter; it belongs with the read, Chapter 19.)

Memory and care

Branch documents. Five per branch: intent, offer, where we are, people, decisions. Wise-Eye writes them as the work goes; they're open to every member unless in a locked domain. (Chapter 23)

The Clearing. The space for being together without an agenda, off the record. Nothing said there is kept or read. (Chapters 12 and 23)

What's sealed. What belongs to a seat or a person, encrypted so the system can't read it: a branch's board, each person's own notes, and their conversation with Wise-Eye, which they can have forgotten. (Chapter 23)

AI

Wise-Eye. The system's AI, built in: the companion beside each steward on each branch they hold. It reads for meaning, routes, drafts, makes sense of what's happening, learns from corrections, and prepares what needs a person's word. It has no seat and no tool for consenting or raising a concern. (Chapters 7 and 22)

Playbooks. Plain documents saying how a kind of work is done, each tool marked as Wise-Eye acting alone, with a person's yes, or never. Principles, never cases. (Chapters 13 and 22)

Earned standing. Wise-Eye's right to act alone, one kind of work at a time: after five low-stakes drafts go out unedited, it offers, and a person decides. One solo call in ten is checked; a wrong one takes the standing away. (Chapter 22)

Beyond one organisation

Network. Organisations that recognise each other and share a steward for their code. When The Grove goes live, each organisation is its own DAO in its own space; as the code stands, they don't yet have one each. (Chapters 26 and 27)

The Steward. The organisation that looks after a network's code and ships releases, taking no fee on what passes between organisations. Distinct from a seat's steward. An organisation in its own right from the day The Grove goes live. (Chapters 26 and 27)

Kernel. The smallest core of the code: the guardrails nobody inside an organisation can vote away. (Chapter 27)

DNA. What makes an organisation itself: purpose, branches, agreements, playbooks and decisions, written by its people and belonging to them. It's what runs on the operating system, the way programmes run on a computer. (Chapters 6 and 27)

Agreement. Two meanings. The organisation's agreement on how its people are here together, which members agree to on joining. And an agreement between organisations, for one to serve another's job, decided by a proposal on each side and looked back on every ninety days by default. (Chapters 10 and 26)

Service. Something a branch offers other organisations, at its own price, by a proposal. (Chapter 26)

Need. A branch's posting of what it's short of, for organisations to answer with a service. (Chapter 26)

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.