A gift community is (amongst other things) a bit like a business without the organisational scaffolding. A group of people working together to create valuable goods and services, but self-organised instead of centrally organised.

For those engaged with the “new ways of working” movement, as it’s sometimes called, the terms self-management and self-organisation are often used interchangeably. That’s a shame because the very important idea of true self-organisation gets lost. A company that gives a lot of autonomy to individuals and small teams is leaning towards self-organisation, but it is not there. If it was, the company structure would be redundant. From previous posts you’ll know that I believe such organisations tend to get caught between either allowing dominion to enter (possibly hidden), or being weak.

A name we sometimes use for truly self-organised social setups is in the ‘scene’, as in the London art scene, the Liverpool music scene. Importantly these are not flat—there are big players and small—but there is no clear centre. Are these scenes free from dominion? Actually no, not at all. An important gallery or record label could easily achieve a dominant position, becoming one of Blake’s “cogs tyrannic”, moving by compulsion the other players, distorting the scene in favour of the wants and needs of domineering people. Of course, that oversized cog is not itself self-organised. It is a machine inside a living system.

Can we imagine some kind of creative scene where such bullies do not emerge over time? It’s a stretch, because power (dominion) begets more power. Like wealth, it tends to concentrate. My belief and hope is that by becoming more aware of our power blindspot—that there are two kinds of power, dominion and potency—and by consciously growing a culture that works hard to promote potency and reduce dominion, we can do dramatically better.

And one insight in particular—that any kind of co-owned creative project is an invitation to dominion—could help us a great deal.

In this post we’re going to look at an example of an entrepreneurial scene committed to the idea of individual creative ownership. We’ll start small, thinking about something akin to a startup. We’ll then give some attention to the question of how dominion can be kept at bay as things start to get bigger.

A startup as a network

The previous post ended with a question: could a gift community really become a powerful and profitable source of economic value production, outperforming a tightly integrated and controlled company? To explore the question we will look at that modern powerhouse of profitability: the tech startup. What would the GC answer to a tech startup look like? Would it work as well?

Before we charge ahead, it’s important to keep in mind that our idea of “works well” might be quite different. To keep it simple, we’ll focus on two simple goals:

• dominion is as absent as possible, both from the start and as things grow,

• the products and services should do well in the market, when competing with dominion based companies.

We’re going to focus specifically on a software startup. These are particularly interesting from a GC perspective because with software it’s entirely possible for a single individual to build a product, market it, and start to make money. This leads naturally to the idea of a network of independent entrepreneurs. But while that may be possible, it is more common that successful startup founders hire people as soon as they can afford to, in roles like:

• Product development

• Design

• Customer support

• Marketing

• Sales

• Accounting/finance

The founder is the one paying the salaries here of course, and so a dominion hierarchy starts to form. How could this be avoided? That last role points towards a simple answer. Most small businesses do not need a full time accountant and so engage an external firm or freelancer. The commercial relationship is similar—work gets done, people get paid—but in contrast to the employer/employee relationship there is no dominion. The relationship is peer-to-peer. The startup is free to switch to a different accountant any time, the accountant is free to drop a client if they so wish. The crucial point here is dependence. The two are not dependent on each other, but they are connected. Each enriches the work of the other. They are interdependent.

Eliminating dependence is not just related to our goal of avoiding dominion, it’s pretty much the same thing. If I depend on you in order to pay my rent, you effectively have dominion over me, regardless of whether you are my manager, my employer or my client. As the term ‘wage-slave’ painfully captures, money is the polite modern equivalent of coercive force. Interdependence, which in this context means peer-to-peer client/service relationships, is the only kind of relationship we are interested in.

Returning to our list of roles, it’s pretty easy to see that outsourcing all of them is at least possible. But will it work well, according to the two goals we identified? As we’ve seen, it does remove dominion from the picture, but will it make for an effective business? Will this approach prosper in the market?

Let’s consider the different roles. Freelance product development and design are certainly a perfectly viable and in fact common ideas (and how I pay the rent myself!). Outsourcing support, marketing and sales is also clearly possible (and common with larger companies, but that’s a rather different story), but is it wise for an early stage startup? Most would consider these functions too close to their core DNA to risk outsourcing. They are the connection points with the customer, and so in a way they define the company. Many startups take great pride in their own unique culture. They want to carefully create their support culture, marketing culture and sales culture. Demoting these functions to mere external services is not compatible with these goals.

But our proposal here is not an alternative route for regular startups. We are exploring something entirely different. To see how it might work we need to step back, right back to before anything that looks like a startup even exists: the moment a creative person has a new idea. Let’s call her Mary.

Mary is a software developer and a member of a gift community. She is already actively engaged in building trust with her peers: sitting together regularly, sharing stories, sharing dreams, sharing support. She has received gifts and given gifts. The community is becoming important to her. Now she feels ready to start an entrepreneurial adventure of her own. She’s had a great idea, she knows a few people who could help her, she’s ready to start building.

We’ll fast forward past a few months of Mary working hard, mostly by herself. She has a product online and she’s making money! She’s been supported by the community all along with encouragement and advice. She wouldn’t be where she is without them. The opportunity is looking big enough that she would love to see someone working full time on sales, and she’s making enough money that she could, in principle, hire someone. Does she? She is entirely aware that an employee is a dependent. Dominion starts small. Such a move would be deeply against the values of the community which has helped her. She also happens to know a freelancer in the community with sales experience who is available to work with her, interdependently.

Mary is in the driving seat here—it’s her money, after all. If she hires someone, she’s the boss. She calls all the shots. Maybe she thinks the business will do better this way. And if the business is healthy that’s good for the employees too, right? Most people do think this way, saying to themselves this is my business. To choose interdependence is to say something very different. Yes this is my creative project, but if a business is going to grow big, it will be ours.

There are no rules in gift community, only culture. We can’t say for sure what Mary will do. In truth the whole project relies on the hope that many people will prefer connection to control; will prefer to be a living part of a living system, rather than the biggest cog in a machine of their own making. I’m optimistic, but we won’t know until we try.

If, instead of hiring, Mary chooses to engage with other freelancers in the community to take care of every need she has as her business grows, what we have is something rather unusual. It’s not a company but a network of peers. As it grows, we are interested in the same two goals. Is the network structure stable, or will dominion creep in? And if it does remain dominion free, what does that mean for its prospects in the market?

Scaling up

The key difference between this model and other approaches to community friendly commerce such as worker-owned cooperatives, is that Mary fully owns the product herself. If her product becomes very successful, all sorts of new and potentially disruptive forces come into play. We should think these through.

Critically, every customer who pays for the software is paying that money directly to Mary (or more likely a limited company, but one that she owns entirely). If this is becoming a big business, she is gaining a great deal of potentially domineering power. It’s well known that the best startups sell incomparably more than merely OK businesses. Mary’s could find herself the gatekeeper of a vast flow of money into the community. This sounds like a problem.

The key, as before, is interdependence. If, as demand has grown, Mary has been able to keep up thanks to a deeply interlocking set of peer relationships, then the money she is making is not sustainable without those. The business is not just a product but a whole suite of services and operational capacity that surround it. Her success is not, in fact, her own. She is certainly in a position of power, and could potentially wrest her business free from the network and start hiring, but breaking away means breaking the operating structures of her business. It would be incredibly disruptive, perhaps existentially so.

Going further, it could be that the software product itself is in fact no longer a single creative work, owned by one person. If you’ll allow me I need to dip into my area of technical expertise here, just for a moment. As software grows, the goal of good engineering is to manage complexity by breaking the problem up into multiple smaller and simpler parts. All skilled product teams do this, regardless of their ideas about ownership. The most complex software often ends up with what is called a service oriented architecture, in which many separate components are combined in a continual exchange of messages (Amazon Web Services famously built exactly this idea into $100B in annual sales). In many ways this is a digital version of the human structure of gift community: separate parts, integrated through client/service relationships. Service oriented architecture is interesting to us because it is eminently suited to individual creative ownership. The technical client/server boundaries (i.e. the ways different parts of the software talk to each other) make perfect ownership boundaries (I’ll build this part, you build that part, we’ll connect them like this). It’s entirely possible that Mary ends up not owning the entire product, and yet her customers still enjoy a beautifully integrated experience. True interdependence.

I believe that exactly the same kind of modular approach to ownership can be applied (and will be very effective) with non-digital businesses. This is actually nothing other than a proper expression of free market ideas—a network of independent actors, collaborating through the sale of products and services, coordinating through pricing signals. The big problem with free markets (and the reason, for example, that we need government regulation and antitrust laws) is precisely the problem of dominion. It is one of the modern world’s great and tragic ironies that the biggest winners in the so-called free market are also the world’s biggest dominators, getting rich at the expense of the freedom of millions. A truly free market could be a wonderful expression of a living system (this is a huge and fascinating topic—we will have to come back later to ideas like coordination cost collapse and the Coasean floor).

The best part of all this is that we have arrived, without even focusing on it, at our big goal from a post or two back. We have on our hands a self-organising competence hierarchy without dominion. When all the connections in this network are peer-to-peer client/service relationships, there is no dominion, and there is every opportunity for competence to be amplified. Each player is motivated to work with the best people they possibly can, and is entirely free to do so. The person with the best product idea ends up with the best designers, the best engineers and so on, exactly the way Louis Armstrong could attract the best musicians. Personal potency is leveraged up into systemic potency. To recap an idea already discussed, this is critically important. Placing a great deal of power in the hands of highly competent people is one thing that dominion systems can do. They do it extremely imperfectly, but they do it, and much better than organisations that try to be flat. The impact in a competitive market is gigantic. If we don’t find a dominion-free way to amplify competence, we lose.

Before we move on from the idea of remaining dominion free as business grows, I’ll briefly touch on a point that might have occurred to the attentive reader—the problem of expensive infrastructure. I cheated a bit by picking software as my example, because the means of production are perfectly affordable—laptops are all you need. If we tried to work through big-infrastructure examples, like food production, power generation, or manufacturing, the story would look very different. This is another big topic for a future post but I’ll tease where I’m headed. As you know by now, I see big problems with the seemingly innocuous idea of shared creative ownership. I have not, however, said anything against shared ownership in general. Infrastructure and creativity are entirely different things. They can be separated. There is a very big idea in here, one I believe could potentially redeem some important but failed ideas from socialism.

Beyond work-life balance

In a true gift community, the separation between a network of commercial relationships and a community to live in would start to fade. What starts as a network that loosely resembles a tech startup later includes freshly baked bread, dance classes, music festivals, electric scooter manufacturing and kindergartens. And it becomes impossible to draw a clear dividing line between any of it, because the whole is nothing but a self-organising network of dominion-free interdependence. It all becomes one big live/work/learn/play/grow/love thing. It sounds highly utopian; I personally think it’s also highly practical. The hard part will be getting started.

A healthy life in community is one where we are free to genuinely become our powerful selves, yet simultaneously we are nothing without our community. We do not control each other, but we are interlocked. If we grow tall it’s because our roots are deep.

It’s worth noting that the communities we live in are not only self-organised. There are laws, of course. If you assault people or steal their stuff there are authorities who will bring consequences to bear. But it’s also obvious that what really holds the strongest communities together has nothing to do with written laws and policing, and everything to do with the unwritten (and unwritable) laws of belonging. True self-organisation is a mystery. We don’t know how we got flying squirrels, we don’t really know how we got jazz, but we did. We also got each other. If we can learn to make ourselves truly powerful together, without resorting to bossing each other around, things could start to get very interesting.

Winning

Yet all of this is for nothing if the products and services offered by centrally controlled businesses are better and cheaper. Everyone loves a local community success story, everyone also loves it when they can afford a car that starts first time on a frosty morning. It’s crucial to be honest with ourselves about this. Can these ideas really outcompete the status quo?

Once again, I’m optimistic! You like that about me don’t you? Go on, admit it! Here’s why—the finely tuned efficiency of today’s global mega-systems is complete bullshit. Central control is vastly overrated. Read some Dilbert; that’s the reality. In the next post or two I’m going to unpack this claim in quite some detail. I much prefer writing about solutions than problems, but we do need to go there I’m afraid. So there’s a bit of a downer on its way. But don’t worry we’ll get past it!

🐘

The last post ended with a nice simplification of our goal—self-organising competence hierarchy without dominion. We also saw the five key principles that I’m proposing as the foundation of gift community. So far, we haven’t quite connected the dots to show why these particular principles are a good starting point, so we’ll try to do that in this post.

In the process we will come across a critically important and perhaps radical idea: shared creative ownership with intention leads to either dominion or weakness.

This will need some explanation but if it clicks for you the way it did for me, the implications are highly significant. It completely changed the way I think about collaboration and led directly to the gift community ideas and all this writing.

But we need to work up to it. First we need to pick up where we left off and examine how our goal of self-organising competence hierarchy without dominion leads to the five core principles of gift community. We’re going to do so with the help of three observations:

• Culture is better than rules

• Desire is better than obligation

• We can find only two sources of potency

Let’s take a look.

The first helps us avoid a tricky contradiction: how can we reconcile self-organisation with having a deliberate goal? The whole point of self-organisation is that it does what it does, not what you want it to do. Nothing can be forced.

But, as every gardener knows, something can be done: we can create the right conditions. The right conditions can never ensure a self-organised outcome, but they can guide us in the right direction. In particular they can help eliminate the things that work against the results we seek, also known as weeding.

In organisational terms, what do we mean by the right conditions? One thing we do not mean is rules. Rules require rulers. They are meaningless unless enforced and enforcement is dominion. This suggests that a company, or really any kind of organisation in the way we normally understand the word, will not make a good container for gift community. Companies are all about rules, policies and fixed processes.

Some do aspire to be different. Using ideas like self-managing teams and high levels of autonomy they aim to free themselves from fixed processes and rules. But if that were really possible, why have a company in the first place? A network of freelancers would do the job. The purpose of a legal entity is always some form of control.

We want to genuinely let go of control, but at the same time, paradoxically, we do want something specific to emerge. We want to see livelihoods and prosperity generated by systemic potency. This can only come from self-organisation, but of a very particular kind. What does it mean for people to organise in a particular way, but without rules?

Fortunately we have a word for this: culture: the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society. The word comes from Latin cultūra, meaning cultivation, tending, or care, and in turn deriving from the verb colere which adds further meanings: to inhabit or dwell in, and to practice or pursue. Culture, it seems, is something to be created and nurtured from within. Culture takes its shape from a shared way of being, and simultaneously shapes us as individuals, in a constant cycle of recreation. (Fascinating aside: colere also means to worship.)

The goal of the gift community principles, then, is to establish the basis for a shared way of being that can persist and grow (both bigger and richer) over time. Rules organise from without, culture from within, just like the difference between dominion and potency. And history shows us that culture can be extremely robust and long-lived. Culture is better than rules.

~

This shift, from organisations to culture raises another important question: how is this thing going to grow bigger and have any meaningful impact? Business has a straightforward answer: make more money, hire more people, do more. And it works. Many companies have changed the world in one way or another. It’s just that they tend to be ambivalent about whether the change is for the better or worse.

Fortunately, as individuals we rarely share this ambivalence. We’d like to see a better world, but our efforts to do something about it seem hopelessly stuck. Specifically, we are stuck in ‘should’. The only way to fix our big problems, the consensus seems to be, is through some form of moral obligation. We should recycle, we should donate to this cause or that, we should vote a certain way, we should boycott certain products. Should, should, should.

As we can all see by now, it doesn’t work. The world doesn’t change unless the obligation is backed up by some kind of force. Leaning on moral obligation may be well intended, but it is also just another form of dominion: you should do as you are told.

Meanwhile, change that does not come from dominion happens all the time, when large numbers of people decide they want to do something new. This is usually when a new technology or idea comes along. Take the way social media has reshaped the world. No one had to be told they should join in, they do it, for better or worse, because they want to.

Being fundamentally opposed to dominion, this is our only option. Yet again the thing we seek must come from within. The desire to participate must flow directly from the activity itself. This is the only way a new culture can thrive. Desire is better than obligation.

Before moving on to the third observation, it’s worth noting that we are in very tricky territory here as the social media example might suggest. The big three desires—money, power and sex—are famously corrupting. And whether we are chasing these big things, or simply cookies and dopamine, none of this feels quite right to get us to benevolent systemic potency. Fortunately we also share some rather more enlightened desires. Here are three that are relevant to our story:

• People love being creative

• People long for strong social connections

• People love to be generous

(If you find that third point debatable, it’s a robust scientific fact about small children. Maybe dominion sometimes beats it out of us)

Our increasingly individualistic, systematised and dominion based world is slowly robbing us of these simple and benevolent pleasures that were naturally present throughout history. I believe there is a vast untapped desire to bring them back—if it can be done in a way that stays genuine and resists the corrupting effects of the wrong kind of organisation (harder than it sounds!). More than anything else, this untapped desire is the source of my optimism.

~

The third observation—that there are only two sources of potency—will explain why shared creative ownership is surprisingly problematic.

Where does genuine potency come from? I don’t mean in theory, I mean where do we see it? Where do we see examples of great power that flows out from within? I can only think of two sources. We see it in certain people, who somehow manage to be ‘in their power’, and we see it in ecosystems.

The personal level is straightforward and is generally what the word potency suggests. When a person is connected to their inner power, we understand implicitly this power is completely different to the one in ‘power corrupts’.

The idea of whole systems having this kind of potency is rather more novel, but we do recognise a great and non-corrupting power in nature, and also in certain kinds of communities such as artistic movements. In both cases we are dealing with ecosystems, in the wider meaning of the word. An ecosystem is any large scale self-organising system with strong internal connections and interdependency. (Fascinatingly, it may be that individual creative potency is actually the same thing.)

It is difficult to prove a negative, but for my part I cannot see a source of potency other than these two. People can be potent, certainly. Any kind of power beyond individuals needs some kind of organisation, which must logically come from either without or within. The first is dominion, the second is systemic potency. We can find only two sources of potency.

~

With that we are nearly there. We now know we are looking for principles which could sustain a vibrant and self-generating culture, that such a culture must speak to the higher things we desire such as creativity, human connection, and generosity, and we have the key observation that allows us to loop back to the discussion of shared creative ownership that we started with.

The problem of shared creativity

Those who are familiar (or those who happened to click the link on the word ‘source’ in the previous post) will recognise the influence of Peter Koenig’s ideas in the first principle of gift community (direction and decision making always belong to the single person who is the source of an initiative).

Koenig’s ‘sourcework’ is based on the observation that successful businesses are very often organised around a single individual who the original creative ideas came from. This person has, according to proponents of the idea, a unique clarity of vision, an unmatched discretion about the choices that will lead there, and an powerful wellspring of ideas. When all this is properly recognised, by both the person themselves and the organisation, things flourish. It is essentially a productive and practical version of something we are more familiar with in the arts—the power of creative inspiration. Anything that points towards a convergence of art and prosperity is on the right track in my book!

Throughout the sourcework ideas, the implicit goal is effectiveness. The core idea is to give creative people decision making authority over the work they are sourcing, for the simple reason that they make better decisions. Nothing wrong with that, but I want to go further. As we have already discussed, our default approaches to organising have left us in a trap of corrupt or weak. Either we lose integrity or we lose power. I believe giving creators not just decision making authority, but complete ownership of their creations, is essential for escaping this trap.

The way I see it, this is an unavoidable consequence if indeed there are only two sources of potency. The key is to notice that, of the two sources—individual and ecosystemic—one is intentional, one is not. A creative person is very much driven by a vision. There is some kind of inner target they are aiming for, perhaps not fully understood but always present. Their creative choices are all made with the intention of realising this vision. An ecosystem, by definition, is undirected. As soon as you try to push the system in a certain direction, you push against self-organisation. Control is dominion.

And so, logically:

• if there are only two sources of potency, individual and collective

• and if only the personal kind is intentional

• then we can either have intention or collectivity, we can’t have both without sacrificing potency.

And given power must be organised either from within (potency) or without (dominion), lacking potency means we will end up either with dominion, or no power organising principle at all and hence weakness.

Shared creative ownership with intention leads to either dominion or weakness.

Or put another way: intention, collaboration, potency: pick any two.

If this is not a little triggering you might not be paying attention. Shared creative ownership with intention is what almost everyone in progressive, make-the-world-a-better-place circles is doing. We are doing it wrong, people!

But this is not bad news, it’s good! We can have our cake and eat it:

• We can have intentional potency—a deliberate goal—as long as creative initiatives belong to individuals

• We can have large-scale, collective potency as long as we let go of the outcome

• We don’t have to worry because this power tends to organise itself beautifully

(By the way, yogis, mystics and true artists all tell us that the best way to be individually creative is also to let go of the outcome. A topic for another time!)

Getting real

Things are getting too abstract. A concrete example will make things much clearer. To show how strongly I am committed to the idea I’ll take the smallest possible kind of collectivity: a partnership of two people. It’s a useful starting point because it’s a very common way that people try to avoid dominion: the 50/50 equal partnership—in it together! What could be better? I’ve been in many of these over the years and they were all fraught with difficulties.

Creative partnerships can be brilliant of course, the problems start when we decide to do something powerful, like start a business. Are we putting equal effort in? Do we really make decisions together or does some kind of jostling start? Do we actually share the same vision? People who have tried it often end up swearing never again! Longstanding friendships founder on these rocks.

My friend Benoît and I recently decided to try something different: a gift community inspired approach. Instead of co-owning a single project, we would separate out what we each bring to the table, and retain personal ownership of our creative visions. We would explore how the projects complement each other, and how we could support each other in reaching our goals. The creative partnership was transformed. Practically, we could quickly see all sorts of ways we could help each other, but the key difference was in how it felt. Lurking concerns and friction, gone! Creative energy, unleashed! If you are involved in a partnership with someone I strongly suggest you give it a try.

The key shift is that we removed the idea of a shared creative intention. The combined creative output was still there, but now it was in the wind. We are in Blake territory again. Blake once wrote that not a syllable in his writing is out of place, and we would do well to pay close attention to the specific words he uses. He rarely writes about right and wrong, or good and evil. What he does greatly object to is anything that binds.

We had unbound each other. Fascinatingly, it actually felt like both more control and more collaboration. More control because we each felt the purity of our own creative vision return to us. More collaboration because when I act in service I am very happy to support you however you need. I trust your creative process. I could feel myself warm to ideas I had previously been very hesitant about. There are always things we do differently. When we try to work on a shared creative vision these differences can lead to compromise and frustration. When we support each other with crystal clear creative ownership, they become a source of beauty.

This is the essence of the gift community vision. A community with tremendously powerful creative output, with no control whatsoever of the overall direction. A community that kisses the joy as it flies.

Before the switch, the combination of shared ownership and a deliberate creative vision meant Benoît and I had access to neither of the sources of potency. We were not free to be fully personally potent, because we had to conform to the wants and needs of the other, and we were not systemically potent because we were trying to push the system in an intended direction, which is not self-organisation. As a result our collaboration would either have shadow dominion or would lack a power organising principle and be weak. Most likely there would be a bit of both.

~

Putting all this together we can now see the foundation of the gift community principles, especially the first three. The last two should also make sense but could benefit from a closer look, which we will get to in due course.

• Creative independence. Direction and decision making always belong to the single person who is the source of an initiative. This is about the gifts we have.

• Voluntary support with commitment. Strengths combine through voluntary support of each other’s creativity. There is no need for or place for authority, but we honour our commitments. These are the gifts we give.

• Spontaneous harmony. The unity and direction of the community emerge spontaneously, never through planning or authority. The power of the system emerges from itself.

• Trust-work. Trust is the bond that replaces authority. It must be actively and skilfully tended to. Trust can be broken easily and unintentionally, so the work never ends. The work is mostly listening.

• Positive reciprocity. When gratitude is expressed directly as a return gift there is a cancelling out and a loss of momentum. Instead we pay it forward with a gift for someone else. Gifts never stop moving and return to us from unexpected directions, energising the whole community.

Hopefully it is becoming clear that these principles could lead to a vibrant and joyful creative culture, largely free from dominion, a source of strong human connection, and a place to both develop and to share our gifts.

But could such a community really become a powerful and profitable source of economic value production, outperforming a tightly integrated and controlled company? It’s a big idea and it’s definitely speculative. We will need to look at systems bigger than simple partnerships of two, and get back to the idea of a naturally emerging competence hierarchy. That’s what I want to write about next.

🐘

In the last post I said we would come next to the all-important how. I’ll start with a simple outline of what I mean by gift community, but there is a bit of a leap from the ideas I’ve shared already. So I’ll then step back and start to show how we arrive at the core principles—why this particular way of doing things could lead to systemic potency.

A gift community is a network of creative and entrepreneurial people, working interdependently with each other, without any kind of coordinating corporate structure. A guiding belief is that such a network could be significantly more productive—and more profitable—than an equivalently sized company.

To move quickly through some ideas that we will come back to in greater detail: there is no imposed structure, but as unity and integration are of course still important, they come from a shared culture. Culture in turn comes from some core principles (which are very much a work-in-progress). Key to the whole thing is the gift. The word has two complementary meanings which are enshrined in the first two principles:

• Creative independence. Direction and decision making always belong to the single person who is the source of an initiative. This is about the gifts we have.

• Voluntary support with commitment. Strengths combine through voluntary support of each other’s creativity. There is no need for or place for authority, but we honour our commitments. These are the gifts we give.

• Spontaneous harmony. The unity and direction of the community emerge spontaneously, never through planning or authority. The power of the system emerges from itself.

• Trust-work. Trust is the bond that replaces dominion. It must be actively and skilfully tended to. Trust can be broken easily and unintentionally, so the work never ends. The work is mostly listening.

• Positive reciprocity. When gratitude is expressed directly as a return gift there is a cancelling out and a loss of momentum. Instead we pay it forward with a gift for someone else. Gifts never stop moving and return to us from unexpected directions, energising the whole community.

This might sound like a pleasant thing to be involved in, but does it sound like a powerhouse of profitable transformation, strong enough to out-compete enormous and inhuman corporate machines?

Only time and trying will tell, but I believe it can happen. In fact I believe those intimidating corporations are in fact inefficient lumbering dinosaurs. They will be no match for systemic potency if we can manage to activate it properly. The only way is to try, but we need at least a direction we feel confident about.

That’s why I’m writing. Not just to communicate why a particular path could be fruitful, but also to understand more clearly myself. For example, I did not expect to write about competence hierarchy in the previous post. It emerged in the process of writing. I now see it as central to the whole argument, and that in turn helps me to express the core idea much more clearly.

The vital need for hierarchy

In organisational settings, we tend to use the words power and authority interchangeably, as if holding authority over others is literally what power is. Consequently, the idea of organisational hierarchy has come to mean one thing: top-down authority. With only one kind of hierarchy, our options for innovation are limited: we could find a way to make authority hierarchy work, or we could eliminate it altogether. Historically, the make-it-work option has divided into two camps, giving us essentially three ways to coordinate, all of which lead to bad outcomes. Roughly speaking:

• Dominating individualism

• Dominating collectivism

• Flat-weak

The first two are different names for positions we are very familiar with form the political Right and Left.

The individualistic Right are more comfortable with dominion, believing that when the strong prevail over the weak the result is best for everyone thanks to nebulous ideas like the invisible hand of the marketplace. This is of course the globally dominant paradigm we are all living in which has been spectacularly successful if you squint in just the right way. With a more clear eyed view we notice that people are increasingly at each other’s throats and the world increasingly on fire.

The collectivist Left quietly agree about the benefits of dominion, but are embarrassed and disingenuous about it. They believe the chosen few can be trusted to wield power “on behalf of the people”, and incoherently try to be collectivist and centrist at the same time. In an attempt to deny that this project relies on dominion, it is hidden behind an increasingly absurd bureaucracy of committees and policies. The result can be even more machine-like and anti-life than right wing approaches, which is why it typically loses out to them in practice.

The third option comes from those who recognise that power corrupts and try to remove it completely. This gives us nominally flat organisations such as progressive, manager-free businesses or anarchist communities. But if the power-organising principle is removed, it must be replaced by another or the system will simply be weak. A pane of glass is about ten times easier to break than an upturned glass bowl. Such organisations aspire to be self-organising without noticing that it is incompatible with their goal to be flat—systems that self-organise tend to form hierarchies, as can be clearly seen in nature. Such initiatives are likely to either remain irrelevant or they morph back towards dominion. It returns in the only place it can—in the collective equivalent of Jung’s “shadow”— endless and highly toxic interpersonal power games. The more evolved examples of such organisations tackle such problem head-on, by getting better at talking through the shadow, which is highly commendable but does not address the lack of a power-organising principle. Weakness returns.

The way out, and I’m convinced it’s the only way out, starts by recognising that toxic-or-weak is a false choice because there is not one kind of power hierarchy but two: the authority hierarchy and the competence hierarchy. In other words a hierarchy of power given by decision, versus one of power that people actually have in themselves, ‘com-potency’. Our problem is that we do not know how to get one without the other.

On the contrary we think the only way to organise for competency is using dominion. Most of us would agree that if we are going to assign authority, it should go to the competent, and so we expect those holding authority to dish it out accordingly. This does not go well. The list of reasons why is long (and important!) but it boils down to a combination of personal agendas and the impossibility of even knowing in the first place who is competent with what. That second point is critical. Left leaning people tend to believe the collectivist-centralist paradox can be solved if only people were ethical enough to genuinely wield power for the collective good, but this also fails. The task is not difficult, it’s impossible. Lots more to come on this topic.

As a result of all this, the very idea of a structural competence hierarchy is met with fear and suspicion in progressive organisations. People simply cannot believe the goal is not covertly pro-dominion because they see no other possibility.

But there is one. Whereas dominion is power organised externally—from without. power can also be organised from within. This truth is all around us every day: there is incredible creative power within natural ecosystems, within certain kinds of communities, within ourselves. And if we pay close enough attention to these things we notice something that changes the whole game: power from within tends to organise itself beautifully.

No one said it better than Blake:

Paradise is wheels within wheels, revolving in freedom. But if they are free, wouldn’t the overall result be chaotic? How are they also in harmony? I think the only honest answer is we don’t really know. But we do know it happens. In nature at least there is definitely a power that tends to organise itself beautifully.

These few words capture a lot:

• This is a tendency. Give it time. Stay true. It will work out.

• This is organisation. Big power. Systemic power is individual power organised.

• It comes from itself. As individuals this power comes when our true self is unblocked. Our systems gain it when we leave them alone.

• It creates beauty. For communities this means harmony, balance, peace, wellbeing.

From the perspective of human organisations, the idea that system structure could work out for the best by doing nothing at all might seem highly fanciful. But this is not romantic wishful thinking. Far from it, it is dispassionate observation.

Bring African and European musical traditions together in New Orleans, wait a decade or two, get jazz; no plan required. Mix great artists and philosophers together with plenty of political freedom in 15th century Florence, get the Renaissance; no plan required. In cities and villages alike, the most loved places tend to be the ones where a certain liveliness has played out over long years without interference.

And why not? After all, the entire universe operates like this. Bring enough matter and energy together to create a very big bang, wait about 14 billion years, get flying squirrels. Some see God in this, some don’t. Everyone sees the squirrels.

I’m not suggesting just doing nothing will automatically lead to a good outcome. If that were the case we wouldn’t have a climate crisis and all the rest in the first place. What I am suggesting is that the problems come from the dominion. If we could get rid of that while being open to spontaneous self-organisation, I believe things will work out very well.

In particular I believe we will see strong competence hierarchies emerging of their own accord. In my experience people like competence hierarchy as long as it’s genuine and not a facade over dominion. We like to see skilled people doing well, we like to defer to them and learn from them, we have a natural respect for the accomplished when they don’t use it as a club to beat us with.

So here is our goal: self-organising competence hierarchy without dominion. The five principles we started with are designed to take us in that direction. To understand how, we will first need to look at three important observations:

• Culture is better than rules

• Desire is better than obligation

• We can find only two sources of potency

We will look closer next post!

🐘

Thinking about our future only in terms of technology is hugely problematic, because we are in a race: technological prowess vs. wisdom. When we get too powerful without getting better at collectively wielding that power for good things, we do bad things instead. It really is that simple. It’s just so much easier to break things than to create. You can sink a million pound yacht with a fifty quid drill. Nobody intended social media to turn democracy into a slanging match all over the world, but it did. The kicker is that technological progress is exponential, while collective wisdom has been inching up slowly.

Every problem we face from the climate crisis to the collapse in mental health is ultimately a symptom of this ground truth. Every solution we discuss, from carbon capture to cognitive behavioural therapy, risks merely masking symptoms. The only real solution is a massive increase in societal wisdom.

Depending on your view of the human condition, this might present a gloomy outlook, and more and more of us are pessimistic. But one crucial fact might save the day: societal wisdom is not the same as personal wisdom. It is systemic wisdom, which is entirely different.

Is that what we are, together? Is that all we can be? I’ve been thinking about such questions a lot and I think I know why it can seem inevitable, but also how it can be different. We have a huge blind spot in the ways we think about power.

More specifically:

• We often conflate two kinds of power: the power of dominion over others, and power that comes from within, or potency. For example we say power corrupts, but potency does not corrupt.

• the distinction exists both inside individuals and inside systems.

Noticing the difference reveals a different take on our big problem:

• Modern society functions almost exclusively through dominion based systems.

• Such systems have created many amazing things, but not collective wisdom. In fact they work powerfully against it (more on this in a future post).

But we could ask:

• Could society function, to a much larger degree, through potency based systems (aka ecosystems)?

• Would such a society behave with much greater wisdom, and be dramatically better at tackling the so-called wicked problems that modernity is throwing at us?

Before we can answer we need a better understanding of what it means for a society to function more through systemic potency. That is the topic of the rest of this post. But I want to first round out this chain of thinking with a final step. Even if the answers are yes, what could we actually do about it?

It’s here that I think the potential really shines:

• I believe the benefits of systemic potency will apply both to large systems (thousands of people and upwards) as well as to small groups.

• We can very easily find out if the second part is true.

• We can work our way up, figuring it out as we go, and I expect it to be great fun and enormously rewarding at every step.

I am putting together some practical advice for starting these kinds of small but growing creative ecosystems, which I call gift communities.

But let’s get back to those questions.

Systemic Potency

To understanding whether potent systems could perform societal functions that today rely on dominion systems, the first step is to clarify the difference between the two.

For our purposes dominion is not about brute force but derives its power from any kind of mental agreement to give one authority over another. The word domination suggests some kind of violence is present, but dominion can be perfectly polite, even friendly. This is important to note because there is a widespread belief that top-down business is old fashioned and the world has moved on. In reality we have mostly shifted workplace language and superficial practices, without wide and deep structural changes, as exposed by the fact that the vast majority of us are not even engaged at work.

Being a product of the mind, dominion is largely absent in nature, but not entirely. It is found in the animals capable of adaptive social structure such as primates and some marine mammals (perhaps tellingly, these seem to be largely the same animals as those capable of sometimes being cruel—inflicting pain on others for no practical benefit). However in nature these structures top out at about 200 individuals. Only humans have elevated the practice to thousands or millions. As Yuval Noah Harari captivatingly explains, we do so using stories.

I also use the term machine systems synonymously with dominion systems. That’s a big topic we’ll be returning to but for now suffice to say that, just like machines, dominion gives us abstraction, prediction and large-scale control. These are extremely sharp tools, but they cut two ways.

In potent systems, by contrast, the power doesn’t come from agreements or anywhere else—it is already there, within the system itself. This is overwhelmingly the type of power we observe in nature. The power to become a flower is within the seed. Or more carefully, the system that is seed + soil + water etc. has that power. Note that this is not about energy. The ultimate energy source is external—the sun—but the sun only heats. Here we mean power in the sense of capability—the capability to become a flower is inside the system itself. In contrast to machines, potent systems are concrete, unpredictable, and not externally controlled.

NAMES MATTER. There is already a well established term for precisely this phenomenon: self-organising systems. Why introduce a new one? Because we need to talk more about power! The global crises we face today ultimately boil down to power. We have many amazing solutions available: regenerative farming, breakthroughs in mental health interventions, people-friendly political processes. We don’t lack solutions, we lack deployment. Time after time the folks with the creative vision find themselves in a massively one-sided power struggle with vested interests. We need to think about self-organising systems in a different way: as a source of power.

Examples of systemic potency abound in nature, but to provide a viable alternative to dominion and machine-systems, we need to know if we can get this to work in our own activities. The best way to show that this is possible is with a real example. Twentieth century America might seem an unlikely place to start, given the incredible degree to which it extended dominion around the world, but it is also the home of one of the most beautiful modern examples of systemic potency: the emergence of jazz.

Artists know how

The idea that a top-down, managed process could have given us jazz is so absurd it’s literally a gag. The emergence of a new art-form happened without a plan, a structure or any kind of central coordination. In other words, a distinct lack of dominion.

Such observations put us in familiar progressive territory—the kind of thinking that leads to collectivist ideas like socialism in politics and cooperatives in business. But these ideas have been around for a very long time. They have been unsuccessful at dislodging dominion as the central logic of our current paradigm.

I believe a large part of these failings has been an oversight in the lessons we have learned about communal creativity. We have overly focussed on what is absent (dominion), and not enough on what is present. If dominion is a form of power, and we observe that it plays a small role in artistic movements, where do they get their power from?

If we step down from abstractions and remember we are talking about jazz, the answer is immediately obvious: the creative power in the system comes from talented musicians. In other words from individual potency. But the end result is not a thousand different creative acts from a thousand individuals, but a beautiful and exquisitely organised whole—a recognisable genre that brings joy to millions all over the world.

The critical question then is not where did the power come from, but how was it organised? This is what systemic power means: systemic power is individual power organised. Remember, systemic potency is just another way to talk about self-organised systems that reminds us to focus on power. Ideas like socialism and worker-owned cooperatives have not brought us to a less oppressive world because they lack an alternative logic of power organisation. The only option was to try different forms of dominion. In a great and tragic irony, the socialist nations ended up much less collectivist than liberal democracies on many fronts, as in the disastrous centrally managed (i.e. dominion based) economy.

Fewer oligarchs means more state. We will never escape this dichotomy without a different way to organise power. Progressive organisations such as those mentioned in the previous post—the so called “teal” organisations investigated by Frederic Laloux and others—are trying to find a genuine solution. Instead of replacing one form of dominion with another, they look to remove it entirely, or at least to greatly reduce its role. But this still fails to answer the central question, how will power be organised? Lacking a clear answer the reality tends to be “not much”. I have come to believe that the lack of major success stories coming out of the self-managed organisations movement is that most such companies are simply less powerful than the best top-down players.

If we apply this question—how is power organised—to the jazz scene, remembering that the power in question is individual musical talent, a number of interesting observations immediately present themselves. The community has many structural features highly compatible with, even necessary for, systemic potency. We will be looking at all of them in depth in posts to come, but for now they are worth simply noting.

Firstly the musicians and singers are generally free agents, associating in endless combinations with other musicians and outfits according to the opportunities and desires of the moment. The central creative unit however is not the individual but the small group—small enough to foster deep mutual understanding and trust, large enough for powerful creative exchange. Despite the importance of groups, musicians have their own status in the community, as opposed to it being tied to their role in a specific band. Players also have a large degree of creative autonomy—on joining a particular group, be it for a year or an evening, they are not expected to blend in but rather to bring their distinctive sound into the mix. Next, the entire system operates as a kind of gift economy. To work is to give: to the audience as entertainment but also to other musicians as new sounds, new rhythms, new ideas. Reputation and status come largely through the generosity and value of your giving. And finally, to introduce one of our most important themes, love plays a very central role in this system. In this case, love of music. More on all this later.

Several of the ideas listed can be found in innovative businesses. For example, engineers at the video game company Valve have wheels on their desks. They are encouraged to physically move towards their preferred working group, much like a bass player shifting between one band and another. However, being overly focussed on reducing dominion (no managers!) they typically miss a crucial feature that was present in the jazz scene: the greats got to be great.

Anyone reaching a certain height was able to attract others into a group that was not just some band, but their band: Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, the Miles Davis Quintets and countless others, some famous some not. With creative authority over the group, the exceptional gifts these musicians had to give could soar to new heights. The better the bandleader, the better the talent they can attract. In other words we see the organic emergence of a competence hierarchy.

This turns out to be tremendously important, because the difference in creative potential between one person and another, in a given context, is enormous. Why are Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald hogging all the limelight? Because they are just that good! (I still remember the moment this general idea first hit home for me: watching The Lion King 2. The original is so good it reached the heights of cultural landmark. The sequel is terrible! I remember thinking who did Disney put on this project?! Obviously not amateurs. So that must be how big the gulf is between the A-team and the B-team).

People with a collectivist leaning can get a bit nervous at this point, and understandably so. Surely by letting the greats become greater, they can start to dominate others? And yes, I’m sure to some degree they do, but here we reach a central pillar of the argument I am trying to make, and I wish I could write this in letters a hundred feet tall:

It doesn’t matter when the system itself is organised for potency, not dominion.

Anyone can write a tune, anyone can start a band, and if you have a day job (as most did, when getting started) anyone can choose who they want to play with (and who they don’t). Some powerful individuals might gain a certain degree of dominion over dozens or even hundreds, but the large scale is overwhelmingly self-organising and potent—the power emerges from within—exactly like nature. The localised dominion is a tiny price to pay for the massive increase in overall systemic power that comes when competency is amplified. It’s the difference between jazz being good and jazz being great. It could be the difference between out competing the top-down domineering world, or being forever dominated.

There is a huge misconception that eliminating dominion means eliminating hierarchy of any kind. The New Employee Handbook which Valve shared with the world declares “Welcome to Flatland”. The future-of-work movement remains obsessed with being anti-hierarchy despite some key thinkers clearly arguing against it. It is rare to hear someone talking about liberated organisational structures without the word “hierarchy” slipping in as a moniker for the oppressive alternative. The general vibe seems to be “OK fine there will always be some hierarchy and I suppose we can live with it”.

This way of thinking does not fly with artistic pursuits because the difference between good and great is so obvious: everyone can see or hear it for themselves. The competence hierarchy is not only obvious but celebrated. But in business or governance greatness is much harder to discern, and in a self-managing organisation Louis and Ella might quickly find their wings clipped. In these circles the term “heroic leader” is derogatory. This is a classic example of conflating dominion with potency as the baby is thrown out with the bathwater. We desperately need to find the heroes of the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible!

A highly developed and powerful competence hierarchy is utterly essential for great creative work. Eliminating hierarchy is not just wrong—it’s much worse than that—it’s anti-potency. It allows destructive machine systems to continue to win in the market.

All this leaves us with two hotly burning questions:

• Can we adapt what we learn about systemic potency from the history of artistic movements to the creation of general prosperity? Can we do food production, education, healthcare, manufacturing and all the rest, the way we do jazz?

• Can such activities self-organise into the strong competence hierarchies that will be necessary to out-compete the status quo, without building large dominion hierarchies with all their attendant toxicity?

I believe the answer to both of these is a resounding yes. We will start to look at how that could work in the next post.

🐘

I’m starting again because I have a suggestion. Not for today, but for some point soon, for those of you who keep reading the posts to come. I’m going to suggest you find four friends and give something a try. I think we need it.

But we’ll get back to that…

I started this publication four years ago (I was shocked to note!), with the intent of bringing a bit of a different take to a movement of world-changing potential that was growing and inspiring a lot of people. By way of a reminder, the first post began:

The unintended consequences of our biggest successes are mounting up. What started as a few carbon emissions, a little pesticide leaching into a river and a bit of lost human connection, is now culminating in runaway global warming, a million species at risk of extinction, and a raging mental health crises.

What if we could flip the story, so that helping each other find the things we really need – connection, meaning, growth and joy – was not a side-effect of progress, but the whole point? And what if the businesses and institutions that pulled off this flip ended up more effective and more efficient than before? The shift towards a kinder world might become unstoppable.

Those last two sentences were incredibly exciting to me. If a new idea is to have meaningful positive impact it needs to not only be better for us, it needs to work better too or the old way will continue to win out in the market. At long last it was actually happening!

I love thinking and writing about all this. And yet I abruptly stopped posting. Why would I do that?

Meanwhile, the movement itself has not stopped but has most definitely stumbled. The poster-child companies are the same today as they were ten years ago, when the book that started it all for many of us was first published. Where are the dozens of new spectacular success stories like Buurtzorg and Morning Star, that we read about in Reinventing Organisations?

In a plot twist I did NOT see coming, the reason behind these two regrettable developments, one small one large, turn out to be the same, and understanding why could change everything. Allow me to start with myself.

I stopped posting because I had a problem with power.

My power to be creative, to stand for something, to make a difference, was being constantly undermined by a set of interlocking hidden beliefs that kept me chasing ghosts instead. For emotional reasons that were completely hidden from me, it was easier for me to play complex and never-ending technical games than to actually engage with the world.

Well guess what? You are reading a post from me! I’ve been working on myself with some wonderful help, and I firmly believe that power problems can be fixed. And the timing couldn’t be better, because it all aligns perfectly with everything I’ve come to believe about the “shift towards a kinder world” from that first post: the shift from a world run by machine-like systems that deaden all that they touch, to living systems that bring us and our world back to life.

On the systemic level too, we have a power problem, and we can fix it.

(For our purposes, take systems to mean all the ways people organise themselves to get things done: businesses, charities, universities, hospitals, communities… and all the way up to large scale healthcare systems, food production systems, systems of governance…)

So welcome to the relaunched and renamed Gift Community Substack!

We are here to explore:

• why the most critical block to the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible (to borrow Charles Eisenstein’s wonderful phrase) is all about power.

• that the well known phrase power corrupts captures something vastly more dangerous than we tend to recognise, particularly as it applies to systems rather than individuals.

• how we often conflate two entirely and crucially different things by using the same name for both: power.

• the need to carefully distinguish between external dominion and inner potency, a.k.a. controlling machine power and spontaneous living power.

• how inner potency is not just a property of people, but of systems (think ecosystems), and how profoundly different such systems are to the organisations we are familiar with, including those we consider innovative and progressive.

• how the ideas in Reinventing Organisations and the wider movement have overly focussed on reducing dominion, and why there has been little success in developing potency.

• how the great secret to potency and flourishing life has been hiding in plain sight for thousands of years—the dance between two universal polarities, destructive when separated, life-giving when integrated.

• why true and repeatable systemic potency will not come from businesses of any description, but from community and culture.

• the vital need to return to the deceptively simple bedrock of culture, almost entirely erased from modern life, so fundamental it is as old as language—the gift.

I’ve got a lot to say about all of these topics and more, and to be perfectly honest I’m feeling pretty powerful about it and I’m not afraid to say it, so buckle up!

For now, I’ll offer some thoughts on what might be a burning question: is it really possible, in this world riven with toxic waste, and corporate greed, and warmongering demagogues, that things like community and culture and gifts could really turn the tide?

Firstly and most importantly, as I think many of my readers will already know, this shift is already well underway all over the world. The book I’m currently reading, The Systems View of Life (Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi) gives by far the best history I’ve come across. They trace it right back to DaVinci! A huge boost comes later, when physicists discover the particle/wave duality, and things really come into focus from the late 20th century up to today.

The shift from machine to living systems is in some sense inevitable, but we are still very much at the “small green shoots” stage. In parallel more and more people are using the word “collapse” in serious conversation. So I see it as a kind of a race—is the progress we’ve made so far sufficient to get us to where we need to be before the wheels fall off?

If that is indeed our situation, then I want to do my bit, and the best way I understand that right now is to try and bring a bit more clarity about what’s actually happening, and how best we can help it along. I think the essence of what is changing is often misunderstood. If my writing leads to just a few more people thinking carefully about, say, the difference between dominion and potency, that will be a win.

To take a hot-button example, Trump is often referred to as the most powerful man in the world. He does indeed have dominion over the most powerful dominating force that has ever existed. Does he have inner creative potency? Is he skilled in nourishing the life-giving potency of the USA? We conflate these things at our peril!

Do we even know what such skills look like? I’m not sure I have an answer, but I have some questions that I believe are important.

I wonder if it’s possible, today, to start building a large creative community that is truly potent and alive, that operates entirely on the spontaneous, inner power of a living system, free from the dominion and abstraction of machine systems. A community where the members are “full time”, deriving their livelihood entirely from the creative work they do interdependently with each other.

It could be very difficult. I’m under no illusion about that. There’s really no way to know if it’s even possible or how long it will take. My personal take is that there is no more worthwhile work to do.

If indeed a community like this became large enough—let’s say five thousand people—I have a bunch of strong beliefs about what follows. Firstly I believe such a community would create dramatically more prosperity for people, with dramatically less waste, than a traditional company with the same number of employees. I believe it would do so in a way that is not extractive but regenerative for every living thing within and around it. I believe it would express the best of human nature—kindness, compassion and love—and would flourish financially at the same time.

Please don’t misunderstand this point—this is very important. I am not saying this community should be kind, compassionate and loving, in order to qualify as a living system. “Should” gets us nowhere. I’m saying it would be. You might not agree, but that’s the argument I will be making. I believe all this would be innate and spontaneous, flowing naturally from what the community actually is, free from agreed political or moral positions, or indeed organised purpose of any kind.

And finally, and here perhaps I reveal myself as a bit of a dreamer, I believe that if such a community comes into being, the world will shift on its axis. More such communities will spring up all over the place, simply because they are much, much better than what we have. It will not be possible to get the genie back in the bottle. Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

~

Beliefs aside, I do know with some certainty a thing or two about how such a thing will come into being, if it does at all. Such a community of five thousand people will grow, spontaneously, unpredictably, wildly, from a smaller living community, of say five hundred people. If it is constructed in any other way it must be a kind of machine, and all of the qualities I have mentioned are off the table. Life grows.

And where will that smaller community come from? Only one answer. It will grow organically from a community of say fifty.

And where… Well I think you get the drift.

So, about those four friends of yours…

🐘

Hello again after a long hiatus, to my very small audience of subscribers, and a plain hello to anyone new who happens along. When I published part one of Flourishing First, I had in mind a vague idea I might get one or two posts out per month. Well that clearly didn’t happen! I have been focussed instead on another strand of my interest in the ideas behind living systems: a long-standing software project, which I hope will one day be useful to the types of organisations and communities I am now, once again, writing about. The paths we follow often lead us back home, and while trying to articulate my goals for this software, I realised it was time to share a piece which was mostly written over a year ago.

I hope you find it interesting, thought provoking, or just an enjoyable read.

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As we saw in part one, the story of living systems is already well under way: a story of stories that together show a path forward that might just lead us out of the mess we’re in.

And we are, without doubt, in a sticky situation. We face global problems that are so complex, and so intertwined with the way we run our societies, that no one is quite sure if we will be able to untangle them before disaster strikes. The very systems we have put in place to create material wealth and our high “standard of living” have severe unintended side effects. We are becoming victims of our own success. The tail is wagging the dog.

The list of impending crises has become so familiar it hardly bears repeating. Climate change, biodiversity loss, the return of inequality, divided societies, meaningless work, extremist politics, runaway mental health problems…

If, as I believe, all of this stems from unintended side effects of the systems we have created to serve us, more of the same is only going to make things worse. The cure will not be found in that which created the illness. To question progress is heresy to some, but this is not an argument against progress itself — clearly we need to move forward to something radically new if we are to grapple with these problems — but we might need an entirely different kind of progress. If our problems are created by our existing systems, we will need to look outside the system for solutions.

Fortunately, we are living in the beginnings of a global renaissance of solutions born outside the mainstream. Just when our confidence in politicians and corporations has all but evaporated, something vibrant and inspiring is happening at the grassroots. The reality is finally sinking in: if we want to take proper care of the natural world and each other, if we want to see social and economic justice, then choosing who to vote for or making ethical buying decisions is not going to cut it. We need to step up and do this ourselves. And we are.

If you know where to look, community-led projects are popping up like the green shoots of spring. Food production, energy generation, responses to discrimination, providing meaningful work, caring for the unwell and the vulnerable, the restoration of natural habitat: all of these things and so much more, can and are being done effectively, cheaply, brilliantly, by local people at a local level.

But there’s a catch. As inspiring as they are, all these grassroots projects tend to share one attribute that makes them a lot less hopeful: they are small. My home town has a wonderful community-supported agriculture scheme providing organic, seasonal, locally grown veg. The town also has seven huge supermarkets with a business model that is anything but local. Construction of an eighth is nearly finished.

Grassroots is not going to do the job while all we’ve got is grass. We need a world-wide flourishing garden. The step-up-and-do-it movement has a growth problem.

It’s worth taking a good look, then, at a grassroots movement that started about fifteen years back and, for a while at least, grew like crazy. This is the (ongoing) story of Transition Town, with its wonderful slogan more like a party than a protest march.

The Ups and Downs of Transition Town

In 2004, permaculture designer and educator Rob Hopkins was soon to return home from Kinsale in Ireland to Totnes, England. Before leaving, he set his students an assignment that was to prove momentous. He asked them if the principles of permaculture could be applied to the problem of fossil fuel dependency. The exercise had led to the concept of a transition town: a place that had adopted an “energy descent plan”: a path for transitioning from a high-carbon to a low-carbon local economy.

Shortly after, back in Totnes Hopkins and his collaborators decided these ideas were worth taking seriously, and in 2006 they established Transition Town Totnes, as a simple banner under which to invite local people to take real action in response to the threats of climate change. If individual action was going to prove too little, they reasoned, and government action too late, maybe community action was the sweet spot that could successfully rise to this challenge. They key word being action. In the face of problems that tend to make us feel powerless, what about trying the power of just doing stuff (a phrase which would, years later, become the title Hopkin’s book on the movement).

This proved to be one of those ideas whose time has come, because something unexpected happened. Almost of its own accord, the movement began to grow. In response to burgeoning interest, The Transition Handbook was published in 2008, opening up the ideas for anyone who wanted to give it a try. Just five years later over a thousand initiatives were up and running across no less than forty two countries: community gardens and kitchens, sharing hubs for tools and equipment and transport, even small-scale clean power production and much more besides. At the peak of the growth, the feeling was palpable that here at last was a movement that could cross over into mainstream life, with an impact large enough to make a real difference.

But as of 2022, it hasn’t happened.

The original initiative in Totnes has worked marvels. The town has become an inspiration for forward-thinking civic planning across the world. But sadly, the majority of those thousand initiatives seem to have remained small and plenty have faded out entirely. Google’s “Trends” tool shows that searches for ‘transition town’ peaked around 2009 and have since declined to about a tenth of that level.

What went wrong?

One explanation revolved around the story of imminent “peak oil”, which was central to the movement’s narrative. Oil shortages and the resulting skyrocketing prices were about to force the world to take energy descent very seriously, or so the story went. But nothing of the kind has yet happened. “Our credibility” wrote co-founder Sam Allen in his 2018 farewell to the movement, “was in tatters”.

This doesn’t ring true for me. As mentioned, the movement aspires to be more like a party than a protest march, and people like parties. Did an abstract and theoretical story titled “Peak Oil” get thousands of people fired up into action across 43 countries, and then half of them gave up when oil failed to peak? Something much bigger than that was happening and still is, but something subtle, something difficult to see, is undermining it and blocking the growth.

Solving this problem could not be more important. The ideas pioneered by Transition really work. We now have a pretty good idea what the sustainable world we so urgently need will look like, we just can’t quite reach it. Transition was groundbreaking, but a further breakthrough is needed.

A Breakthrough

We love a good breakthrough these days, don’t we? The big media outlets gush breathlessly about the new technologies poised to revolutionise our lives: artificial intelligence, genetics, robotics. Elon Musk is building a computer we can inject into our brains. (Let’s hope that one can’t be hacked!)

But against this very inhuman-sounding backdrop, some share a very different hope for the future. It’s a hope that the true breakthrough of our time, which in retrospect might make all those clever things look a lot less important, will be something much closer to home.

If we understand the word technology in its broadest sense — ideas and discoveries that make new things possible — the breakthrough tech of the twenty-first century may well be this: a world run in large part not by giant corporations and huge bureaucracies, but by networks of small groups of people, going about their business, doing things that matter to them, taking care of each other and the environment around them, and doing a much better job than the top-down, command-and-control systems we all inhabit today.

The vision of the Transition movement and many like it, is to build this new world from the ground up, but a crucial piece of the new technology has been missing. The ideas and discoveries that will get us from grassroots to a flourishing global garden are not yet fully in focus.

Which brings us back to the previous post and our story of stories, because these are the stories of the missing pieces. Is it possible that the practices and principles of living systems can solve our grassroots growth problem? If so, then we are in a very good place, because these practices are not mere theory but the lessons learned from real projects helping real people. Not only do we know what we need, we know how to make it happen.

The how is critically important. There are countless books telling us what this world needs in order to be more sustainable: we need to hold corporations to account; we need to each hold ourselves to account; we need a carbon tax; we need a new approach to economics; we need a whole new perspective, a paradigm shift. All of which may be true, but is of little use unless we know how to get there. What should we actually do? And telling others what they should do doesn’t count. What should I do?

This is the question I believe people like Jos de Blok, Hillary Cottam and John McKnight have answered. I believe the work they have done holds the solution to the growth problem of the grassroots renaissance. To understand why, we need a new perspective, one that questions our deepest assumptions about human activity and our relationship with the natural world.

The times we live in ask us to square up to truly enormous challenges: transitioning the whole of society to use less energy, or reorganising around small, local groups. But our true challenge may be even more dramatic. It is something we unconsciously recognise in the term grassroots, made explicit in the term living systems.

We are creating life.

Not biological life of course. We will not be looking at stories of mad scientists with lightning flashing in secret laboratories. But life in the sense that we all readily use the word: ”this place seems so alive”, “I felt myself coming back to life”, “we need to inject some life into this”. We all know instinctively that some things are more alive, and some less, and that this has nothing to do with plants or animals or cells. We know that this quality of aliveness is profoundly important. Things that are alive are thriving, they flourish, they grow. And on the contrary, nothing is worse for a project than to be lifeless or dying.

The central premise of Flourishing First is that this hard-to-define aliveness is far and away the most crucial quality we need to aim for if we wish to make the world more kind, more just and more sustainable. In fact I will go further and claim that without this quality, whatever we may try, we are doomed to recreate the very problems we are trying to solve. Let’s take a closer look at why this might be the case.

Motivation Matters

An obvious feature of any grassroots movement is that participation is voluntary. Top-down organisations have the power to bring incentives to bear: do as we ask and we’ll pay you; do as you’re told and you won’t go to prison. Bottom-up not so much. These projects must attract rather than compel. People join a movement like Transition Towns because they want to. A keen member might give ten hours of their time every week, someone less enthused might give half an hour ever other Christmas, each according to their personal feeling towards the work. Psychologists call this intrinsic motivation, and it is the key to our growth problem. For a time, more and more people wanted to jump in to the Transition Town movement. Later, less did.

What makes people step up and do it? One factor, clearly, is idealism. Some people seem to be just innately motivated to try and make this world a better place. They believe in the idea of a better world and they believe it is possible to work towards it. These beliefs are strong enough to motivate them into action. They might join a community garden project partly for the pleasure of gardening, but largely because they can see that here is a path to a brighter world.

It’s pretty clear from observation that idealists are something of a minority, and that’s not surprising. Ideas are immaterial and abstract. They can lead to real change of course, but in themselves they are pure thought-stuff. That makes idealism very powerful, but also very nebulous. Taking a historical perspective, idealists have helped bring about our greatest breakthroughs in justice and liberty, but also our most horrific atrocities. Ideas can be very, very dangerous.

But let’s not get side-tracked into the pros and cons of idealism; that way lies an endless and probably fruitless philosophical debate. My point is just to observe that most people — and this is probably for the best — are more concrete in their motivations. Most people join a community garden for the pleasure of gardening, or they don’t join at all.

So an obvious and rather defeatist explanation as to why grassroots movements do not grow to world-changing proportions is that there simply aren’t enough idealistic people. Not much you can do about that. But the early growth of Transition Town tells a different story. For a while there it looked like this thing was going to take off and go mainstream. Did the movement break through the ‘idealist limit’? If so, how? And why did it not keep on growing and growing?

From the start, something was fundamentally different about the Transition project. Here’s co-founder Sam Allen again:

“[we realised] the need for deep, far reaching systemic change in just about every area of life… There was no name for what we were proposing. It was bold, imaginative, and beyond what most folks thought of as environmentalism. It wasn’t environmentalism, it was much more than that. Much more.”

If most people are not particularly motivated by ideas, then there’s really only one way to make a movement like this more appealing. You have to get from abstract ideas to concrete reality. You have to take the future you wish for, and try to make it a lived reality, today. This is exactly what the Transition movement set out to do. Allen again (emphasis added):

“As we are all, in some sense, part of the problem, we invited people into an uncomfortable experiment. What would it be like to live both as the problem and a potential solution?”

This was nothing less than an attempt to create a different kind of life. A thousand projects and forty three countries later, this was clearly a life that spoke to people. Maybe they simply enjoyed it. Isn’t being happy the point of life, after all? The Founding Fathers of the USA even built their constitution on it: “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”.

But is the goal of life really to be as happy as we possibly can? Modern psychologists might disagree. Research has shown that there is such a thing as an excess of happiness. Most of us have are ups and downs, but there are some atypical folks who report being happy nearly all the time, and those same people also tend to report things like excess alcohol and drug use, binge eating and risk taking. Life without the light and shade might be more like a disorder than an aspiration.

When it comes to motivation, perhaps the key word in “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” is actually that first one: the best thing in life is simply life itself.

I’m not talking about the difference between actual life and death, but about degrees of life.

Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine a less powerful version of Aladdin’s genie: there are only two wishes on offer, and you get to pick just one. In the left hand, an everlasting Netflix binge, where every episode is better than the best TV you ever watched: every joke hilarious, every action scene jaw-dropping, all the drama gripping, all the actors achingly beautiful, and to sweeten the deal, a magic pill that ensures you never get bored of watching. In the right hand, unbreakably loyal friendships and an incredible job. Your life will be intricately tied up with the joys and sorrows of those close to you. Your work will give deep meaning to your days, with continuous opportunities to grow, along with the conflicts and difficulties that make that growth possible. To me it’s pretty obvious which is the richer life and the better choice. The good life, surely, is found not in the pursuit of happiness, but in the pursuit, simply, of being fully alive.

It is painful then, that we live in a time of incalculable loss of life. This, I believe, has been the most tragic cost of our project to tame, control and systematise the world. Life is wild and risky. Control is deadening. We have been so successful at making the world safe and predictable it is making us numb inside. And that is to say nothing of the destruction of so much of the natural world. Blake’s words which we saw in part one bear repeating:

“Cruel Works of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic, Moving by compulsion each other; not as those in Eden, which, Wheel within wheel, in freedom revolve, in harmony and peace.”
William Blake, Jerusalem

Perhaps what the Transition Town movement offered, best of all, was more aliveness. To re-localise the economy is to rediscover our neighbours. To rely less on fossil fuels is to rely more on each other. Less industrial energy, more human energy. Lower emissions, greater life.

Just as Sam Allen explained, Transition was an invitation to live, today, in the world we want to see tomorrow. More than the idealistic goal of averting climate disaster, I believe it was this step away from the machine-like system, this offer of a richer life, that enabled the movement to grow almost to the point of becoming mainstream.

Almost, but not quite. Something is getting in the way.

Habits of Control

As important as this hard-to-define thing called aliveness is, we don’t pay very close attention to it. It sits just below our radar. It probably means more to us than anything else, but we unconsciously consider it a mere side-effect of other things. We never concern ourselves with aliveness directly. When it comes to creating life, we are novices, green behind the ears. We know aliveness when we see it, we know it works wonders, and we know we love it, but we know little about what it really is, where it comes from or how to get more of it.

When we look at the systems that run our modern world, they are all things we have designed and built. But living systems cannot be created in this way, any more than we can design and build a rose. Roses grow. Living systems emerge spontaneously, from a process we can encourage, as gardeners do, but never control.

If there really is a technology that can give us more life, it will be unlike any technology we are used to. The fundamental breakthrough will be less about how to do something, and more about how to stop doing the wrong things: a technology of getting out of the way. This is not easy.

Thousands of years after the dawn of agriculture, our insatiable desire to tame this wild world has given us habits of thought deeply ingrained. The mindset of control has become so automatic, we can’t imagine life without it. This, I have come to firmly believe, is the hidden force subtly undermining thousands of beautiful projects striving towards a better world. We try to control things instead of letting them grow, and in doing so we choke out the life.

Am I suggesting that movements like Transition end up co-opted by domineering control-freaks? Well yes, I do think a few people like that tend to crop up, but there is a wider problem that is much more subtle. We all do this because we don’t know how to do anything else. We want these movements to get bigger and have more impact, so we reach for what we know. With the best of intentions we turn to subtle forms of control. We don’t call it control, we call it ‘organising’, but organising through control is such an entrenched idea it has become automatic. We can’t help ourselves. It’s been drummed into us since the first day of school.

Any grassroots project that enjoys some kind of success will inevitably start to grow. At a certain point, spontaneous beginnings will need to give way to some kind of structure, or disorganised mess will result. To out great cost, we are mostly unaware that this moment is filled with peril. If we don’t understand the principles of living systems then we will necessarily turn to control. The mess is avoided but something essential is lost. Slowly but surely, what was at first an opening into a richer life starts to feel a little bit more like just going to work.

And unlike ‘normal’ work, a particular feature of grassroots projects is that there is little other than personal motivation holding them together. If I don’t find what I’m looking for there’s nothing stopping me from simply not showing up tomorrow.

Could this perspective explain the lack of large-scale impact despite the great proliferation of grassroots projects? Bottom-up movements always start off wonderfully alive and free, but as they grow, it’s inevitable that well-intentioned little chiefs will began to emerge. That might sound rather innocuous, but new life is a fragile thing. It might also sound necessary, but there is another way. We can organise like an organism. We can build living systems. We just need to learn how.

As we saw in part one, the five principles of living system are nothing less than the systemic manifestation of love, and what, more than love, could lead us to a life worth living?

What if joining in a local grassroots project meant much more than just helping out with a meaningful cause? What if it became the source of our own flourishing? What if we discovered more and more truth, about ourselves, our friends, and the issues we care about; if we found rich opportunities to be of service; if our personal autonomy, and that of our work teams was respected and supported through deep connections; and what if all of this became gradually stronger and stronger over time through living growth? Who wouldn’t want to stick around?

And most importantly, what if all of these opportunities for flourishing could remain present as the project got bigger and bigger, delivering more and more impact? Transition Town itself, still going strong, might be one place where we will start to find out; the ideas of living systems are gradually getting more attention within the movement.

The great hope is that we will start to see grassroots initiatives growing large and powerful, not by adopting top-down control, but organically, through living structure. A structure not built from Blake’s cogs tyrannic, moving by compulsion each other, but from wheels within wheels revolving in freedom, harmony and peace. Perhaps a modern Eden really is starting to grow around our feet.

Welcome, dear reader, to this first issue of Flourishing First. I had originally envisioned these writings as a book, but I’ve since realised that squirrelling myself away for months on end would not be the right way to go, so here I am, writing in public. What’s to come will probably make more sense if you think of it as a serialised book.

OK, here goes. Wish me luck! ~Tom

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Me first.

Two small words have provided much of the energy driving human progress. When we each pursue our personal self-interest, or so the story goes, things get better for everyone. But when everyone wants to be first, something’s got to give. Deeply intertwined with our ideas of success is an uncomfortable necessity: control over others. As a result, we now have a society where almost everything – business, politics, science, education, healthcare, and on and on – is organised into huge systems of top-down command-and-control.

There is a flaw in this plan. Our wild world defies control. The unintended consequences of our biggest successes are mounting up. What started as a few carbon emissions, a little pesticide leaching into a river and a bit of lost human connection, is now culminating in runaway global warming, a million species at risk of extinction, and a raging mental health crises.

What if we could flip the story, so that helping each other find the things we really need – connection, meaning, growth and joy – was not a side-effect of progress, but the whole point? And what if the businesses and institutions that pulled off this flip ended up more effective and more efficient than before? The shift towards a kinder world might become unstoppable.

It’s already happening. This is the story of extraordinary new companies and communities that are figuring out how to place human flourishing before control, with spectacular results. They are living systems because they borrow some neat tricks from nature: life blooms when we get our self-centred agendas out of the way, healthy balance comes when systems self-regulate, and flourishing environments spontaneously lead to more flourishing. Control deadens, but life begets life.

Looking carefully at these stories, five principles of living systems emerge: truth, connection, autonomy, service and growth. In these principles we find a link to some of our greatest insights, both ancient and modern, revealing the historic significance of the shift unfolding around us. Pulling all this together, a process comes into focus that can help us gradually bring our businesses, our communities and ourselves back to life. What follows, in this issue and those to come, will be a deep dive into why we need to put flourishing first, and how this process works.

Good Stories, Big Ideas

The how of living systems is, in a way, the easy part: others are already figuring it out. A huge shift, from top-down control to bottom-up flourishing is already well underway. We are finally leaving behind false assumptions that workers are lazy, self-serving and only useful when following orders. In fact, decades of research and practice have shown that when given the chance we are resourceful, responsible, creative and generous. Our best work comes when we have autonomy, purpose and the support we need to grow.

In parallel, digital communication technologies are transforming the ground-rules of cooperation. Thanks to our new found abilities to effortlessly discover, connect and transact with each other, much of the traditional machinery of organisation is becoming redundant. The impact of these changes has only just begun.

Together, these two trends rewrite the very DNA of organisations and communities. Management, authority and rigid job descriptions are giving way to self-directed teams and fluid roles. Command-and-control is losing out to sense-and-respond. People and purpose are starting to matter more than profit, and yet profits continue to flow.

I will be retelling some of the stories of this shift to examine how different organisations and projects are moving towards the ideal of living systems. Examples include: from business, Dutch healthcare firm Buurtzorg with its ten thousand nurses but zero managers, and tomato processing giant Morning Star where authority over others is entirely banished; from social care, Hilary Cottam’s Participle and the power of relationships and capabilities; from politics, the radical trust of Big Organising and India’s remarkable ‘neighbourocracy’; from sustainability, the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s research on ‘social-ecological systems’; from community life, the work of John McNight and Asset Based Community Development and from mental health care, the shift in focus from medication to social prescribing and stronger communities.

From these stories and many more, the aim is to uncover the lessons learned and the common themes. By connecting the dots, we can firstly see how broad this movement is, but more importantly, how practical the discoveries are. There is something here for every business and every community that wants to join in. The most important lesson of all is that human flourishing is something we have to do together. All of the breakthroughs from these pioneers are about how to do that.

The why of living systems is trickier. Any claim that a particular course of action will turn out well is obviously a prediction for a story not yet written. This is the realm of big ideas – not practice but theory – and that should raise some alarm bells. Grand theories of human progress have a very sketchy history, having more than once led to genocide.

The ideas I will be sharing are more a sort of anti-theory. Drawing together insights from philosophers, artists, poets, architects and system thinkers, and ideas from psychology, mathematics, complexity science and economics, I will piece together an argument, part logical and reasoned, part poetic and intuitive, that the best way to make the world a better place is to forget the complicated ideas and try to improve things a little for the people right next to us, and yes, for ourselves. That might sound self-indulgent, but there is good reason to believe it is this and only this that will turn out for the best for all of us, and for our natural home.

If ‘be nice to each other’ doesn’t sound like an idea poised to change the world then read on, because there is meat on the bone. True, it is more than fifty years since the Beatles sang All You Need is Love, and true, many of the folks singing along at the time later decided what they really needed was a killer property portfolio, but something important has changed.

Back then we didn’t know how. Now we do.

Love in Action

The hard part about all-you-need-is-love, it turns out, is scaling up. If love and scaling up don’t sound like they belong in the same sentence, that rather makes my point. The bonds of love between us are incomparably more powerful than any other kind of relationship, but we struggle to extend them beyond our immediate circle.

This presents a crucial difficulty for the more loving world we might wish for. The days when we organised ourselves in groups no bigger than the extended family are long gone. Today, huge systems keep society ticking. They are here to stay and will continue to shape our lives. There’s no way around it: for a kinder world, we need kinder systems. That means kinder ways for large numbers of people to work together.

We are so accustomed to institutions that are essentially heartless, the idea that something like an education system or a food production system could be organised around love sounds hopelessly impractical. And yet, something extremely practical is happening. The new approaches to cooperation behind this shift are so down to earth, even those in the middle of these companies and communities might overlook the full significance. These are not stories of acoustic guitars and tie-dye, but of regular people doing perfectly normal work extremely well. Only when we look carefully at the organising principles at play, do we discover love as the underlying motivation.

The principles which I see cropping up again and again are five: truth, connection, autonomy, service and growth. We will be taking a careful look at how these principles work in large systems later on, but right away we can see something fascinating: these principles are not new at all. In our personal relationships with those we love, they are entirely familiar.

What does it mean, practically speaking, to love someone? We confide in them and have the courage to be honest (truth). We obviously have a deep connection with them, but we also know that if you love somebody (to borrow some lyrics from Sting) you should set them free (autonomy). We offer them kindness and support (service). And finally, how do we live up to such lofty ideals? Bit by bit. Love is not something we can just “do”, but something that grows.

All this is simply a way of talking about things that come perfectly naturally, as old as the hills. Love in action. The breakthrough is that these principles scale up.

Living Systems

Suppose you wanted to see more love at work, say, within a project team. If you’re not cringing already, your colleagues might well be when you bring it up. But even if, like some progressive organisations these days, you manage to get past such unhelpful conditionings, what would you actually do? Free hugs? Bake cookies? At some point you’ll need to get back to work, and old habits will return. The heartlessness of traditional organising runs deep. This is about where the flower-power generation got stuck. Work shapes the world. Being more loving on the weekend is not enough.

But an organising principle, like truth, is another matter entirely. A whole host of simple practices can be brought to bear. Transparency is an obvious one that’s already well established, and more far-reaching ideas are popping up. Facilitated meetings, writing down work agreements, and prioritising psychological safety are just a few examples. They all make teams more honest and more aligned. They promote truth.

We can scale up further. The same practices can apply to a whole department or a network of teams. We might turn to technology to improve transparency, with a shared knowledge store or an open question and answer forum. Service agreements between teams can be agreed upon and published. In short, we make a systemic commitment to truth.

The other four principles work the same way. Connection and autonomy join to become connected autonomy, the dynamic dance playing out at every level of scale in living systems. These are the two fundamental forces of cooperation, in opposition and yet creating each other, as in the Taoist principle of yin and yang. To be completely autonomous is to be disconnected; to be completely tied by connections is to lack autonomy. Conversely, without a strong self there is nothing for connections to hold on to, yet without the support of others, the self withers. Connection through autonomy, autonomy through connection. All this applies to people, to teams, to communities and beyond, as symbolised by the fractal yin yang from the header of this issue.

Service is the structural principle that allows connection and autonomy to coexist. Individuals, teams and organisations are connected by the services they offer, not the rules they impose. Offering rather than controlling expresses the humility that is essential if life is to emerge. If I do what is asked of me as best as I can, things will work out. Each part acts in service of something greater.

Finally, growth is the living process by which the whole thing takes shape. Living systems cannot be designed intellectually and then implemented. They emerge from the collective intelligence of the community. The system is not built in pieces but starts whole and stays whole, developing through small, adaptive, experimental steps, each grounded in the lived reality of here and now.

All of this is, of course, a work in progress. Whether or not these five really are the fundamental principles of living systems is a question we can work on together. The more important idea is that there are core principles of love in action, that can also be used in systems of large scale cooperation. This is now beyond doubt, and the implication is startling. Asking people to love everyone at work might be a tall order, but organising ourselves as if we did turns out to be surprisingly simple (if not always easy). And it works wonders; living systems are not charities that rely on handouts to make a kinder world, they just work better.

If that wasn’t enough, the same five principles turn up again and again, as a golden thread running through cherished inherited wisdom, works of art and philosophy, and from there on to modern advances in mathematics, psychology, computer science, systems thinking and even (one of my favourite stories of all) architecture. It turns out we have known this stuff for a long time, and it is all now coming into sharp focus from multiple angles.

We are discovering the systemic patterns of large scale cooperation that express genuine togetherness, kindness and compassion. By honouring these principles, we can create living systems, in which large numbers of us can work together in a manner that is fundamentally life-giving. We flourish. And when we flourish – not because we got the promotion or the car or the accolade, but because we find connection, meaning, growth and joy—our world will flourish too.

Life vs. Control

By contrast, the vast majority of the systems that run the world today are based on a very different core principle: control.

To an overwhelming degree, the modern world is shaped by industrial-scale, top-down, command-and-control: production, distribution, commerce, science, education, governance, healthcare, all of it. They are not living systems but control systems. Pretty much our entire history has been shaped by one way of working together: rules and rulers.

If — as Yuval Noah Harari tells us in Sapiens — cooperation at scale is our magical power, bossing people around has always been the secret to the trick, because it scales like crazy. Rulers get rules of their own. The big cheese is subject to an even bigger cheese, and so on and on, big as you like.

We must not forget that, on one level, command-and-control has been doing an incredibly good job. Compared to our forbears, we are all vastly less likely to be murdered or killed in a war or starve to death, to be constantly cold or in pain or hungry, to be enslaved or otherwise brutally oppressed, to be blighted or killed by a horrible disease, to be illiterate, to work ourselves into an early grave, or to witness our children perish before growing up. While we cannot gloss over the painful fact that these things are all still happening, from the long perspective they are all in dramatic decline.

But a dark undercurrent ever present is now building into a tsunami (and depending on your gender, ethnicity, and where you call home, it might have always been one). Despite our successes, the idea that we could control everything – to become “masters and possessors of nature”, as Descartes put it – has been an abject failure. Control always has a side-effect, always an unintended consequence. These don’t disappear but start accumulating somewhere, and the debt is coming due. The ice caps are receding and anxiety is rising. Societies are fragmented. Inequality is making a dramatic comeback. Democracy is suffering from extremism on one side, disengagement on the other, and manipulation throughout.

Life is wild, spontaneous and free. Life is self-organising and unpredictable. Control is anti-life.

Until we understand this, our attempts to build a kinder world will always end up recreating the same old problems in new forms, as generations of revolutionaries have learned the hard way. At last we have a better way. We are finally figuring out how to scale up caring cooperation without slipping back into our deeply ingrained habits of control.

“Cruel Works of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic, Moving by compulsion each other; not as those in Eden, which, Wheel within wheel, in freedom revolve, in harmony and peace.” William Blake, Jerusalem

Love and Fear

If living systems are ultimately motivated by love, what is the driving impetus behind control systems? It is of course just the opposite. The opposite of love is not hate but fear.

The “me first” story of progress casts us as selfish individuals seeking wealth and power. A more cooperative story would leave us all far better off, but if everyone else is looking out for number one, it would be terribly risky not to do the same. In a world of competitors, fear is the great motivator. Whether we face primal fears for our very survival or more modern insecurities, the result is much the same: the scary world must be brought under control. Security comes from wealth, power and popularity, and so we call these things “success” and drum it in from childhood.

And so we arrive at the full understanding of the moment we find ourselves in. Fear demands control. Love nourishes life.

The shifts taking place are at the very foundation of life and society. Deep truths that were once the preserve of philosophers and mystics are spoken in offices and community centres. The stories of living systems are taking us from a world driven by fear, to a world pulled by love.

We are waking from a collective ego trip thousands of years long, to discover the perfect world we were trying to build was nothing but a fortress against our fear of each other, while the garden we always wanted to live in was right here all along. The problem was, we didn’t know how to live in the garden and enjoy all the wonders of progress at the same time.

And now we do.

In the issues to come, I hope to do such grand themes justice. I hope you find the connections as fascinating as I do, and I hope especially for hope itself – that all this can do a little to restore a sense of optimism for the future, because there is great reason for it. The breakthroughs are very real, and they really work. Ultimately we need to inspire each other to get out there and get to work. There’s a garden that needs tending and it’s going to be a beauty.

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And if you enjoyed this first issue, please subscribe! Here’s a taste of some of the things to come:

• The many failings of control systems, from institutionalised stupidity to moral failings, and a disastrous mismatch with the structure of our toughest problems.

• A deeper look at the five principles of living systems, especially the key breakthrough of connected autonomy, and at the practical process by which businesses and communities can develop into living systems.

• The five principles as a theme running through much of our cherished heritage wisdom, in particular the Taoist classic the Tao Te Ching and the symbolic art and poetry of England’s William Blake.

• The links between old insights and new, including the work of systems thinker Donella Meadows and psychologist Robert Keegan.

• The convergence mathematics and nature found in chaos theory and complexity science, where the principles of living systems show up yet again.

• The breathtaking search for living structure in the work of architect Christopher Alexander, and his important insights into the process by which it emerges.

• And of course, a great many stories of living systems.

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