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.