A friend in a community of practice recently said something that is all too common. Her ongoing curiosity, she said, is how to bring an invitation to the “inner” more actively into her work in the “outer.” She already senses that the inner work matters. What she doesn’t have — what most of us don’t have — is a way to bring it in that doesn’t feel like adding one more thing to an already full plate.

I related to the question the moment I heard it, and I recognized the tension. Many of us know that changing systems means changing ourselves, learning new practices and unlearning dominant habits. We are the system. And yet the way we’ve been taught to hold inner and outer — as two separate spheres, with the inner work always needing to be integrated into the outer — is itself the problem.

In the last post, I traced the torus as the shape governance, money, and power take when they flow rather than concentrate — one circulation at every scale of living systems. This post turns now to the innermost scale, the one we tend to leave out of the governance charter: ourselves.

Practitioners are arriving from many directions at a similar insight: we belong to systems larger than ourselves, and so we cannot govern as if we stand outside them. One of the clearest maps of this is the familiar socio-ecological model. Spun on its axis, the concentric circles open into nested systems at every scale — each one whole in itself, each one entangled with the others.

In the version on the right, the shape of each nested system is a torus — a continuous surface, no apex, no edges. Always in motion, always returning to center.

Karen O’Brien, in You Matter More Than You Think, draws similar nested circles, but reads them from the other side: the personal sphere — our beliefs, values, and worldviews — isn’t the small ring in the middle of things. It’s the outermost and most encompassing one, the most powerful place of leverage we have. The inner isn’t adjacent to systems change; it’s the medium the rest of it swims in.

On the torus there’s no contradiction in that — outermost and innermost are the same orienting depth, met from opposite sides of one continuous surface.

This is why the inner work can’t be adjacent to governance. Governing living systems isn’t the work of changing systems “out there.” It’s how we participate in systems we already belong to — which means the somatic and contemplative practices of awareness, presence, and self-regulation aren’t a supplement to governance. They’re inside it. And governance, properly understood, is the question of how we create the conditions for that kind of participation.

So here is the tension this post is named for. Even in networks where practitioners design the very governance they then live inside, the “outer” and the “inner” can sit strangely apart. Many of us learned to hold them as separate spheres, even subconsciously rank order them, and we go looking for bridges between them.

In the outer work, we recognize structural governance — distributed authority, recognized agency, the question of who is authorized to decide what. This is where nearly all the attention and tinkering goes. The inner work is the quieter thing: the personal navigation, the governance of the self, the felt sense of values, intuition, growth, and choice beneath all of it. How often does that get put into the governance framework or charter?

As Indy Johar notices, the structural version of governance falters on the terrain of complexity — it tries to authorize action in advance, but in a complex system, what’s needed can’t be fully known ahead of time. So it answers who is authorized to act, but not what orients the self that is now authorized. The standard answer is that the shared purpose orients us — but that is still outside-in, a direction handed to the self from beyond it. And so we are left, again, searching for a bridge: a way to integrate the inner more actively with the outer.

Here is a different move. Not a stronger bridge — the recognition that there was never a gap to cross.

A torus is a single continuous flow with no permanent inside or outside. A current rises through the center, opens across the surface, flows down around the periphery, and returns through the center to rise again. What is inside in one moment is outside the next. So inner and outer are not two domains. They are two phases of one circulation. Center and periphery stay distinguishable — they don’t collapse into each other — but they breathe, in and out, as one motion.

The relief in this is not a more elegant integration of inner and outer work. It’s permission to set down the effort of building the bridge.

In my 20s, navigating my way into adult life, I came across a line from Frederick Buechner that became a kind of mantra: I am called to the place where my deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. That single sentence became a compass for how I made career moves over the decades that followed. The criterion was always to serve both at once.

Buechner brings the inner and outer into a single breath. The meeting place isn’t a span between two domains; it’s one place that exists only because both gladness and hunger are present at once. Even now, the inner work I’ve had to do to put my ideas into the world isn’t separate from the sense that this is a calling I’m meant to step into. When I feel a calling, I assume it’s not something contained just in me. The world — something larger than myself — is doing the calling. Part of how I know it’s a genuine calling, and not something I “should” do, is that I feel an aliveness about it, so that even when it’s hard, it satisfies.

And this meeting-point isn’t a place you find and then stay. The systems move around and through me; the torus is what holds that circulation. I keep breathing between my gladness and the world’s hunger, and the work itself keeps changing as I do.

Holding the inner and outer in one flow is also what keeps me from dissolving into despair about the world’s hunger — easy to do these days — or exhausting myself trying to meet it. David Whyte, the poet and philosopher, tells a story about his own burnout working for a nonprofit. A friend, the poet-priest John O’Donohue, asked David whether he knew the antidote to exhaustion. The antidote to exhaustion isn’t rest, he said, it’s wholeheartedness. In the language of the torus, Whyte’s boundaries had gone too porous — the flow dissipating outward into the world’s hunger without returning on the in-breath of his own deep gladness.

The opposite can happen too. Sometimes people feel guilty for their own gladness while others are suffering — and that guilt can wall the gladness off, pooling it where it never flows back out to meet the hunger it was meant for. None of this is to diminish rest, which is a basic human need. It’s to notice the individualistic quality that words like wellness and well-being have taken on lately — the way they’ve drifted toward retreat, the in-breath without the out.

There’s a four-fold version of Buechner’s compass: Andrés Zuzunaga’s Purpose Venn diagram — what you love, what you do well, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for, meeting in the center as purpose. It offers a four-direction version of the same felt discernment: where I’m open or closed, what I’m collapsing toward or away from — like, all passion and no profession, or all vocation and no love.

The way Zuzunaga came to the diagram is itself part of the point. On The Ikigai Podcast, he describes creating it — long before it was widely mistaken for ikigai — during a period of regular meditation and contemplation on purpose, reflecting on the questions his clients brought and on what natal charts revealed. Insights would simply arrive, from a source that felt like a mystery to him. One of them was the seed of the diagram. It came to him, not from him — sensed, the way these patterns tend to be, rather than constructed. Drawn flat, it tempts the eye to find the single spot where all four circles meet and stand there. But it was born as a living orientation, and the torus gives it back its motion: purpose isn’t a place I arrive at and hold. It’s an ongoing navigation among four pulls, the still center I keep orienting around while they move.

I want to be honest about where this gets harder, because resourcing the self can quietly become its own trap. There’s a version of “inner work” that never circulates — that pools in me, walls off, and justifies itself as health. The tell is the return path: does what I tend in myself flow back out to meet a need, or does it terminate in me? That’s the difference between a self that stays transparent — letting the flow pass through — and self-centeredness, a self bending everything toward itself. Self-transparent rather than self-centered: the center the system orients around isn’t me, it’s the purpose I’m in service to. Resourcing makes the circulation possible; it is not the end point.

Which brings me to autonomy: if we’re all breathing in one flow, what happens to sovereignty? Sovereignty and relationships are not opposites — they flow through each other in a deeper wholeness. Autonomy is the membrane’s capacity to close. And that capacity is exactly what makes opening safe rather than self-erasing. A self that cannot close cannot truly participate; it loses itself in whatever it’s near. The freedom to say no is what gives any yes its meaning. Or, as Toni Jones sings in her song No is Bae, “A dishonest yes is an honest no — to myself.“

This is not an abstract point. It’s one of the places our inherited governance fails us most concretely. Coercive hierarchies don’t just concentrate authority; they teach us that objection is costly and dissent unsafe. Many of us, in different ways, have learned to keep our real reservations quiet. So people arrive in network spaces — spaces that ask for genuine co-creation — without the felt safety to bring their full agency, in whatever form it takes for them: floating a proposal, asking for help, or knowing when they are authentically not in consent and saying so. You can’t simply declare a network non-hierarchical and expect that safety to appear. It has to be woven through trust, because the opening is only real if the closing was genuinely available.

A friend of mine has a finely tuned detector for when it isn’t. His vocation puts him in a corporate hierarchy with a private equity firm at the helm. He bristles at slogans like “teamwork makes the dream work” — not because he doesn’t love a real team, he does, but because he can feel when belonging is being extolled from outside the room by someone who quietly collects the return. That reaction is accurate. It’s a boundary doing its job, refusing to let his gladness be conscripted into someone else’s accumulation.

And he shows me the limits of inner work, too. He can be rested, resourced, boundaried, entirely self-transparent — and still spend his working day inside a hierarchy where the decisions arrive from above and there’s nowhere for his intelligent sensing to go. The flow is blocked there, and not by any failure in him. A pyramid is a torus with its return path cut. The flow runs upward and never returns. No amount of inner work completes a circulation the structure won’t allow.

Which is the whole point, and why the inner and the structural were never separable. Agency — the freedom to act on how one is genuinely called to act — isn’t a personal luxury layered on top of governance. It’s a structural requirement of governance designed for regeneration. This is a real transformation of what most of us have meant by the word: not authority distributed from the top of a sound structure, but the return path built in from the start, so that what people sense can actually move and shape their own participation and the whole.

The consent principle is one of the mechanisms that keeps that path open — grounded in respect for both autonomy and belonging. It’s the meeting point of the two, just as a healthy membrane must be able to open and close. The principle is plain and exacting: I can’t truly say yes if I’m not free to say no. A flow I’m not free to refuse isn’t circulation; it’s a pump. But a refusal that doesn’t consider its impact on others isn’t consent either — it’s self-centeredness posturing as sovereignty.

Authentic self-governance can never be commanded from outside. The moment it’s required for someone else’s gain, the sovereignty it depends on is already being violated. Nothing about us without us.

So what finally orients me is not myself. It’s a pull I can feel and can’t possess — the sense of being called because something is calling. I’m not trying to integrate my inner and outer work. I’m listening from my own resourced self to where the inner and outer are already seamless — between gladness and hunger, between holding and opening. You matter more than you think, as O’Brien puts it: not because you act on the system from outside it, but because you are one of the places the system breathes.

The same orienting pull operates at every scale, named differently as we go — mystery at the personal scale, shared purpose at the group and network scale — but it’s the same gravity. And the same movement — the breathing between giving and receiving, the self that stays whole by staying in flow — is the seed of the next scale, where groups and networks and networks of networks are governed by the same shape.

Or is something already here, near enough to work with?

This series, Governance That Flows, is about putting into words a pattern that has fascinated me over the last 10 years, that keeps revealing itself. Not a framework; rather, animating principles for a different governance shape for the paradigm we are living into. Not a model; rather, living visual patterns that have the potential to re-orient us holistically in ways that are contextual, culturally differentiated, and freely adaptable. It’s a common symbolic language repeating itself across many traditions already converging on this work, and in this series, I aim to describe it.

The first three posts set the context:

First, governance reclaimed as the navigation of living systems: how we navigate the polycrisis of this time is a governance question, and if we cede the word, we cede the territory to bureaucratic institutions least equipped for it.

Second, the recognition of governance, money, and power as one circulation rather than three separate problems — and that when the flow concentrates into an apex, it drains possibilities away. Networks are a locus of governance, and the upstream move is to fund relational infrastructure and circulate resources.

Third, there are structural distinctions between nested hierarchy and nested systems, between containment logic and relationship logic. Governance in living systems is like a cell membrane: not the mechanism that constrains flow in service of order, not the absence of constraint in service of flow, but the living intelligence that maintains coherence through flow.

The piece you are reading now is about a shape that holds those threads together, a working architecture inside the flow, and the way this shape functions as an animating pattern.

Governing from Inside Systems

Practitioners arrive at this threshold from different directions, but they converge on an insight: we belong to systems larger than us, and therefore we cannot govern as if we stand outside them.

Governance in living systems is not the work of changing systems “out there.” It is how we participate in systems we already belong to — which means the personal work, the somatic and contemplative practices of awareness, presence, and self-regulation, are not adjacent to governance. They are inside it.

When You Spin the Model

The familiar socio-ecological model — individual, interpersonal, community, society, drawn as concentric circles — has been the field’s shorthand for nested systems. But it is often misinterpreted through the containment logic of nested hierarchy, where each scale contains the ones below it. Individuals are part of families, families part of communities, communities part of societies. In organizations: individuals in teams, teams in organizations, organizations in larger systems. The names of the levels change — neighborhoods in cities, cities in states, states in countries — but the logic holds.

This is a nested hierarchy: each level contains the level below it, and it is the primary organizing logic of governance. Most governance frameworks, even the most progressive ones, are still operating from containment logic — assuming that coherence requires a boundary to hold things in place, that structure means enclosure, that governance means defining what belongs where. But anyone doing the work recognizes that even these boundaries have fuzzy edges. And the containment assumption really strains at network scale.

When you spin the socio-ecological model on its axis, the concentric circles open into nested systems at every scale — each one whole in itself, each one entangled with the others. It offers an image of interwoven belonging, that the socio-ecological model pointed toward. This image is doing more, which the rest of this series will elaborate.

You can imagine yourself on the inside, your relationships and communities and society all around you, connecting through you. In the language of networks, you are a node. The lines that flow through you in this image are lines of interconnection with nodes at every other scale — they are “all my relations” expressed as geometry, a phrase rooted in many Indigenous traditions. Each node of interconnection implies another center of nested systems, with overlapping connections to other centers, to infinity.

Thich Nhat Hanh offered a core teaching on what he called interbeing — the insight that nothing exists independently of anything else — that illustrates this interconnectedness across scales. From The Heart of Understanding (1988), adapted here:

This piece of paper I am holding in my hand is something that exists right now. Can we establish a time and place of birth for this paper? That is very difficult, impossible actually, because before it manifested as a piece of paper, it was already here in the form of a tree, of the sun, of a cloud. Without the sun, without the rain, the tree would not have lived, and there would have been no piece of paper. When I touch this piece of paper, I touch the sun. When I touch this piece of paper, I also touch the clouds. There is a cloud floating in this piece of paper. You do not have to be a poet to see it.

We can see it clearly in our relationships with food. We are connected to agricultural systems every time we eat. The kinds of minerals that are in soil – or that are absent – connect directly to the minerals we need to sustain health. Chemicals used in food production on every scale are detected in our bodies.

In the image, the connections are uniform and stylized, but the visual is only a representation. The reality is differentiated. Some connections are strong, some frayed, some healthy, some extractive, some missing entirely. The inquiry the image invites is into the quality of those connections. The visual is a map; the practitioner’s work is in the territory.

If we are inextricably woven into the fabric of life, then looking through the governance lens, what are the agreements we make with all of our relations?

The Shape Has a Name

The shape that holds this nesting has a name.

It is a torus — a continuous surface, no apex, no edges. Energy moves inward through one vortex, through a central axis, outward through the other, wrapping back around to begin again. Always in motion, always returning to center.

The mathematics of the torus has its own field of geometry, called topology. The stylized images help us perceive it, but the only criterion of a torus is a continuous surface with a hole in the middle. A typical coffee cup is a torus — the hole is in the handle, the rest is one continuous surface.

It’s worth pausing here to notice how this dynamic shape in motion itself carries regenerative principles.

In nature, the torus is a way that energy moves: in the water cycle, in the magnetic field of the earth, in the spiraling field around the black hole at the center of our own galaxy, in the chambers and rhythms of the human heart. Recently, scientists mapped a continuous toroidal manifold of neural activity through which the mammalian brain maintains spatial orientation and navigates through geographic places, even during sleep.

These are torus patterns — self-organizing, self-correcting, circulating, and renewing.

A torus is a flow and a structure at the same time — the structure is the flow. That is what lets it dissolve a forced choice the field has been navigating: between order and emergence, between containment and circulation.

What Flows Through It

The torus gives a shape to the trilogy that the second post named — governance, money, and power — as one circulation rather than three coordinated systems. The same shape carries all three.

When shared purpose sits at the center of toroidal motion — not as a mission statement or strategic plan per se, but as a gravitational pull, the way a black hole draws energy in — the structure holds without containing. The metaphor of the black hole mirrors the idea of purpose as a calling: the mystery of the muse that beckons yet never fully reveals itself.

The center here is not the self, not the human, not the institution. The center is what the system orients around, at every scale. Purpose-centered rather than self-centered. The architecture de-centers the human as well, by its geometry.

Power, in this frame, stops being the elephant in the room. It becomes what Mary Parker Follett always named it as — life itself, the drive to realize purpose — flowing through the torus rather than accumulating at any apex.

Others name the same thing in the language of physics. Larissa Conte defines power as the capacity to move energy through systems; John Buck, as the capacity to get work done.

In a toroidal architecture, this capacity is scale-consistent: through the person, as the capacity to self-regulate and act with intention; through the team, as co-regulation and the work that emerges through shared purpose; through the network, as pluricentric coordination and coherence held across difference. Same flow, same shape, different scales.

The Patterns Inside the Flow

Inside the toroidal flow are regenerative patterns the field already recognizes. The spiral holds feedback loops, cycles of iteration, and learning. The lemniscate holds mutuality, paradox, and the regenerative cycles of life, death, and rebirth. The overlapping circles hold common ground and interconnection. And the circle itself holds inclusion, equity, and wholeness.

These patterns are not decorative. They are the working architecture inside the flow, and many existing practices in the field already deploy them, under different names.

A Coherence, Not a Framework

The torus, in this sense, is not a new practice to adopt or a new framework to install. It is a coherence within which many existing practices already participate.

Sociocracy participates in it through the double-link and the consent process within organizations. Prosocial and Ostrom’s core design principles participate through the eight principles of cooperative self-governance. Doughnut Economics participates as a toroidal space between human needs and planetary boundaries. Pando Funding participates in it by financing system change networks rather than isolated projects, resourcing the health of the whole. Bioregional organizing participates through watershed and place-based mutuality. Indigenous frameworks have been holding the pattern from the inside out, through traditions older than any of these.

Practitioners do not have to leave their existing work to recognize the torus, and neither do networks. Both can experience a coherence their regenerative work already participates in — a different kind of invitation than adopting another tool.

What the field has been missing is not another methodology, though those are helpful. The offering here is a shared symbolic language — the torus and the patterns it holds within it, the spiral, the lemniscate, the circle, the overlapping circles. These patterns are signaling an emerging world view, visible in many forms now: in regenerative frameworks and tools, visual representations, and even logos.

These cross the many traditions already converging on this work; and, across cultures, these symbols appear in architecture, jewelry, visual arts, ontologies, healing modalities, and spiritual traditions. Like fractals, the patterns appear at different scales, but no two manifestations are exactly the same. Held collectively, they are living visual patterns that re-orient us holistically in the coherence of a new — or remembered — paradigm in which life flourishes.

The discipline of holding the torus this way matters. The moment it becomes a blueprint to install, a proprietary model to license, or a singular set of patterns to apply, it becomes the very thing it is trying to replace. Which is why the work is to hold it as descriptive and invitational.

A Remembering

Governance that flows is not an innovation. It is a remembering — of patterns that have been operating beneath many traditions and practices, and a making-visible of what is already at work.

A practical shift this invites is from one question — what is your governance structure? — to another: what pattern of flow does your governance embody? And then to notice what becomes visible.

Subsequent pieces will deepen this exploration of torus as organizing, regulating, and regenerative power that flows and circulates across scales; how resources might flow through a toroidal architecture; fractal patterns and specific practices held in this coherence.

But the invitation of this piece is simpler. To recognize the shape. And to feel where it has been with us, all along.

Something keeps being expressed in the rooms where practitioners of social and systems change gather: a sense that the field is building something real and is still somehow short of what the moment requires.

Networks have given the field genuine capacity — distributed connection, shared learning, generative new relationships, and even tangible shifts across harmful systems. And yet, the conditions of polycrisis keep outpacing the response. Practitioners who have spent years building networks feel it.

One word that names what is missing is coherence. Not just more connections, but the kind of integration where networks experience themselves as whole, and whole networks move together at scale.

“Together we can do what no one can do alone.” Not one heroic leader, institution, sector, or network focusing on one system can do it alone. The sense of who needs to be included in the wholeness keeps widening.

Ilya Prigogine’s work on dissipative systems offers ground beneath that longing: in conditions of turbulence, islands of coherence carry the capacity to shift the larger system toward higher order — not because they are large, but because they are coherent.

This is not a distant hope. It is already visible in practice: in networks where resources flow through relationships of reciprocity rather than mere transaction; where power circulates with trust to where responsiveness is needed; where self-governance is grounded in sensemaking and learning rather than control. Accountability remains, but is held differently when control is not feasible.

The Decline Curve

The conditions that make coherence possible are also the conditions of our moment: the legacy systems of centralized governance, concentrated wealth, and institutional authority are not merely struggling — they are in the decline curve that living systems enter when they lose fitness with their environment.

The Berkana Two Loops Model illustrates this. As a system loses its fitness, those who wield power often become more controlling, doubling down on what worked before, while the new forms are already being born at the margins — rarely visible to those maintaining the legacy system, already practiced by those it never fully included.

The data on Americans’ trust in government reflects this systems story. Decades of decline across demographics — age, race, education, gender, political affiliation. One point of view people pretty much share is that “most elected officials don’t care about what people like me think.”

This registers the arc of a system that has lost coherence with the people it was meant to serve.

Strategies that double down on the legacy system — however well-intentioned — are doing what systems in decline predictably do. The invitation of the two loops frame is not how to fix the declining curve, but how to nourish what is emerging alongside it.

The invitation to all of us is to re-orient through the grief and despair: in the regenerative cycle of birth, growth, maturity, and decline, death is not the end of the story. What follows is rebirth. What feels like the end in a linear system is a threshold for a new beginning in a circular one.

The narrative of hope is already present — just fragmented and somewhat invisible still. Part of what is needed, what this series aims for, is to make it more visible, so that people can feel the network, the earth, rising to meet them, and find it possible to let go of the shore and move into the current.

Two Rooms, One Reality

The network practitioners doing this work arrived with at least two distinct frames of reference, and the work deepens considerably when they hold the overlapping insights together.

The complexity-literate folks arrived at networks through systems theory — emergence, non-linearity, the limits of prediction and control. Their language is epistemological: we cannot know what we think we know, therefore we cannot govern the way we think we can govern.

The ecology-literate folks arrived at networks through place and relationship — watershed, bioregion, mycelium, mutuality. Their language is relational and embodied: we belong to systems larger than us, therefore we cannot govern as if we stand outside them.

They are converging on the same structural insight. The complex adaptive system and the place-based practitioners are arriving from outside and inside, to find themselves in the same reality described in different languages.

Bioregional organizing makes this convergence visible in practice. Place-based networks are ecologically grounded by nature, and the moment they try to make collective decisions, move resources differently, or coordinate across nodes with distributed power, they run directly into complexity governance questions.

This is where governance, ecology, and complexity become one living question: how does a network that is already ecologically grounded, already complex, already trying to move resources differently — how does it govern itself coherently?

The Structural Shift

Here is a vision of what coherence looks like at network scale: governance, power, and resourcing all flowing through the network rather than concentrating upward into an apex. The network as the form governance takes in complexity — clustered and boundary-spanning. The network as the form power takes in complexity — distributed and pluralistic. The network as the form resourcing takes in complexity — reciprocal and collective. A trilogy that is one circulation, increasing possibilities rather than draining them away.

That reorganization is not the means to the structural shift — it is the structural shift. The ecosystem developing its own coherence is the systems change, not the precursor to it.

This is also what explains why ecosystem development, as the field has framed it, keeps feeling insufficient. When the ecosystem is the road toward a separate destination, you don’t turn often enough to follow how governance, resources, and power are circulating throughout the network. There can be focus on making connections and building relationships, while the coherence gets sidelined.

The Honest Frontier

Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize-winning work on commons governance gave the field something durable: eight core design principles through which groups can successfully steward shared resources without either privatizing or centralizing them. David Sloan Wilson and colleagues built Prosocial World on Ostrom’s foundation, generalizing her principles beyond common-pool resources to any cooperative endeavor, and the framework has traveled into bioregional organizing, regenerative communities, and governance work around the world.

The eight principles work as a system to build the conditions for genuine self-governance: shared identity and purpose, equitable distribution of costs and benefits, fair and inclusive decision-making, peer monitoring, graduated response to behavior, and fast conflict resolution. Sociocracy offers, among its contributions, named methods for two specific principles in this framework: fair and inclusive decision-making and authority to self-govern — the how nested inside the what.

And then comes principle 8: collaborative relations with other groups — the principle that looks outward from the group to the network it belongs to, applying the same design principles that create coherence within groups to the relations between them.

Principle 8 is where the framework arrives at its own honest frontier. It names the inter-network governance question, but the jump from groups practicing these principles to networks-of-networks becoming a locus of governance is a threshold the framework points toward but doesn’t yet seem to cross.

Sociocracy’s double-link reaches but does not cross that threshold because it is a hierarchy tool — designed to carry influence across authority differentials between levels that already exist. In a network, where any node can potentially connect with any other node; there are not levels to link between, and the tool ends up imposing the very structure it assumes.

This points to a conflation the field hasn’t fully named: nested hierarchy and nested systems are not the same thing.

Nested Hierarchy Is Not Nested Systems

Nested hierarchy carries an authority relationship between levels — each level contains the one below it, the nesting itself being the authority relationship. Even when softened, even with double-links, the containment logic is structural. Groups contain sub-groups.

Nested systems are mutually constitutive without authority moving between levels. An organism is nested in an ecosystem. The ecosystem influences the adaptations of the organism but doesn’t direct them. Each level has its own coherence, shapes and is shaped by the others simultaneously. The nesting is participation, and the boundaries are permeable rather than containing. After all, organisms move across ecosystems.

When practitioners design for nested systems, they often inadvertently import nested hierarchy logic — and the frameworks they build strain at network scale because the picture they are working from is wrong.

The body offers a teaching image, but it turns out to be a liminal case that illuminates the distinction rather than settling it. Cells nested in organs nested in the organ system suggest containment — but hormones travel everywhere. The nervous system connects everything to everything, including beings outside the body. Colonies of non-human cells regularly take up residence in human bodies, and many of these are essential. These systems are organized by relationship and purpose, not by scale and containment.

A distributed governance network is more like the hormone system than the organ system: in theory, any node can connect with any other node, centers form around purpose rather than scale, and the pluricentric structure doesn’t stack neatly because it isn’t trying to contain — it is trying to respond.

The Question That Changes Everything

Eva Sorensen names this structural condition: governance networks are naturally nonhierarchical. Not that they should be. Not that they could be if we design them right. But that they are, by nature, as a consequence of the complex conditions that summon them.

This shifts the governance question in a way that changes everything: not how do we build decentralized networks — a design question with a designer at the center — but how do we govern in networks that are already naturally nonhierarchical?

That is a stewardship question. It assumes the network already exists, already has its own nature, already precedes the framework — and asks how we participate in and tend something we did not make and cannot command.

It is also a biomimicry question. When Janine Benyus says nature has already solved the problems we are wrestling with, she is not being poetic — she is pointing to 3.8 billion years of research and development in sustaining coherent living systems with relational architecture.

Governance that flows is not an innovation — it is a remembering. Indigenous frameworks across many traditions have been holding this knowledge from the inside out, not asking how to build a nonhierarchical system but how to stay in right relationship with what already is, which turns out to be the same question from a different and older lineage.

Containment Logic and Relationship Logic

Most governance frameworks, even the most progressive ones, are still defaulting to containment logic — assuming coherence requires a boundary that holds things in place, that structure means enclosure, that governance means defining what belongs where. This assumption is what strains at network scale.

Containment logic asks: what contains what. Relationship logic asks: what is in relation with what. In a distributed network, a key organizing principle is relationship, not containment — nodes connecting to other nodes, centers forming around shared purpose, which sometimes includes scale and sometimes doesn't.

“All my relations” — mitákuye oyásʼiŋ in Lakota, echoed across many Indigenous traditions — holds this most completely, because it doesn’t begin with structure. It begins with relationship as the primary fact of existence: you are in relation with beings at every scale simultaneously, the river, the ancestor, the child not yet born. And participation holds coherence.

Governance as Membrane

Living systems offer a picture of how coherence is actually maintained. A cell membrane doesn’t sustain coherence by hoarding flow — it sustains coherence through selective, intelligent, responsive flow. The boundary is not where flow stops. It is how flow sustains coherence.

This is governance understood as membrane rather than border: not the mechanism that constrains flow in service of order, not the absence of constraint in service of flow, but the living intelligence that maintains coherence through flow — the way a cell membrane knows itself, the way a watershed knows its basin, the way an authentic community knows its culture.

Raworth’s Doughnut Economics models this at planetary scale: not fixed walls but thresholds, boundaries that are semi-permeable, that regulate rather than block, that know what they are in relation to what passes through them. The membrane is self-regulating, not self-contained.

This dissolves the false choice the field has been navigating: governance as structure or flow, containment or relationship, boundary or emergence. In living systems these are two aspects of the same living motion.

Containment achieved through relationship, coherence maintained through flow — a living system needs both, and they only work when they are in motion together. The paradox the field keeps arriving at is not a problem to resolve but a pattern to inhabit. This is the gift of reclaiming the word governance as it was originally intended: as navigation.

Two Things Held Simultaneously

What this moment asks of practitioners is two things held simultaneously: the structural precision to understand what is failing and why, and the visionary capacity to feel what is rising and trust it, belong to it.

The field is already arriving at this threshold — in comments threads and conference rooms and the margins of frameworks that almost hold it. The rooms recognizing each other. Practitioners sensing that ecosystem development is the systems change. Networks feeling the pull of something that connection alone doesn’t provide.

This piece is not an argument for a new framework — it is an attempt to name what practitioners are already reaching toward and show the bridge that is already beneath their feet. A “strengths perspective” means to notice what is already available and working. This moment calls for recognizing as much as designing, remembering as much as innovating.

The question that has kept practitioners up at night — how we govern networks that are already, by nature, nonhierarchical, in service of coherence — turns out to be asking for a shape, a pattern that living systems have already worked out, one that sustains coherence through flow rather than despite it.

That shape has a name, and the next piece is about that.

The first post in this series claimed governance as the precise word for how we navigate together toward shared purpose — not as a stand-in for stewardship, strategy, or relational infrastructure, but as the most accurate name for those constellations of practices.

Once we hold that word with care, three things often treated as separate problems begin to show themselves as one shape:

Governance, Money, and Power.

The way money moves IS a governance act. Who decides where money moves IS a power arrangement. The three are not just coordinated; in the dominant culture they are three names for the same circulation viewed from different angles. Which means governance, of all things, is where the heat is. A colleague of mine, Michelle Smith, likes to joke that this is what makes governance sexy.

In the dominant paradigm, governance, money, and power concentrate together — at the same apex, by the same logic. David Korten calls this empire culture. To see how that concentration happens, it helps to leave the meeting room for a moment and watch a hillside in the rain.

A hillside in the rain

When rain falls on bare soil, water finds the path of least resistance and begins to concentrate in narrow channels. The narrower channels allow the water to run faster, which erodes deeper channels, which pulls in still more water. The rushing water carves deep gulleys as soil is washed away. Paul Krafel, a naturalist who has spent decades watching this happen on the land, calls it a downward spiral — possibilities draining away with the runoff.

The same dynamics shape wealth and authority. Money flows toward where money already is. Decisions migrate toward where decisions are already being made. This is not a metaphor borrowed from nature; the same geometry holds wherever the flow away from a place outpaces what circulates within it. A neighborhood whose dollars leave through a few large corporate outlets; a region whose talent and capital concentrate in distant centers; a sector whose decisions accumulate in fewer and fewer rooms; these are different scales, but the same shape. This is concentration by physics.

What gets starved

In the field of social change, what gets starved when resources concentrate is the relational infrastructure beneath the visible work.

Turning to nature for guidance again, in the forest, what we see are trees. But the trees are sustained by a vast underground network of mycelium that channels nutrients between them, brokers exchanges across species, and holds the whole system in mutual nourishment. Networks for social change behave more like forests than projects. The visible programs are sustained by a slow weave of trust, communication, and mutual learning. And yet, funding cycles geared to programs and predetermined outcomes feed the trees and starve the mycelium.

We struggle to see what gets starved because we have learned to recognize only the kind of power that concentrates. Krafel names two powers: the visible power that runs off and erodes, and the invisible power that soaks in and creates soil. The first we celebrate; the second we overlook. Yet it is the second that raises the earth.

The upstream move

To shift from downward spiral to upward spiral, Krafel does not oppose the runoff. He goes upstream, where the rain first begins to leave the land, and makes small openings that invite the water to soak in. Water held in this way soaks in, becomes groundwater, and nourishes plants whose roots and leaf litter create more surfaces that hold the next rain. The slope grows greener. The spiral reverses direction. The work that was invisible at first, grows on itself as natural allies emerge.

What might that upstream move look like in funding?

Here’s a practical way to consider it. Trees share up to thirty percent of the sugars they produce through photosynthesis with the mycelial networks beneath them. Nearly a third of the food they make feeds the mycelial network that, in turn, sustains the forest. It’s not tit-for-tat or transactional: there are no metrics of return on investment. It is the complex reciprocity of living systems.

What if a meaningful share of investment — say, a sustained thirty percent — went to relational infrastructure: the trust, communication, and learning that lets a network behave like a forest?

Mycelial work has practitioners. Bridgespan calls them field catalysts; the field also names them backbones, network weavers, ecosystem builders, and systems stewards. They are the roles invented to do what the dominant funding model has yet to learn to value and feed.

The live edge

An upstream move is taking form across the field — quietly, in many rooms, often invisible to one another.

David Renz observes that the locus of governance is moving above the level of the individual organization — from the networked organization to the network as organization. Michael Quinn Patton and Ruth Richardson trace an evolutionary arc from autonomous foundation grantmaking, through alliances, toward principles-driven networks of networks. Dimple Abichandani names a relational shift inside philanthropy itself — from holder-of-wealth to mover-of-wealth, from governance-proximate-to-wealth to governance-proximate-to-community. John Fullerton, working from finance, names robust circulatory flow as one of the principles of any healthy living system.

The practices reaching toward this shape are visible too: trust-based philanthropy, participatory grantmaking, community giving circles, bioregional financing, Pando Funding, and long-horizon capital, to name a few. These are early forms of resources flowing through rather than concentrating upward.

Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, an association of more than six thousand funders, has just published Toward Meaningful, Valuable, Equitable Governance — a sign that this conversation is alive at scale within the funder community itself. Their own diagnosis is that current governance frameworks are static while community needs are dynamic — a square peg in a round hole, they say. They name innovative models — shared governance, minimal-viable boards, a network advisory group described by one member as “like a murmuration.”

The vocabulary is reaching toward ecology: ecosystems, networks, mycelium, a murmuration of birds. What GEO’s leading-edge work does not yet ask is whether the shape itself wants to change. The unit of governance throughout remains the individual organization; the alternatives are still alternatives within or attached to a single board.

The shift the field is reaching toward, but has not yet crossed the threshold of, is structural: the network itself emerging as a locus of governance, with the individual entities nested throughout it. To inhabit ecological language structurally is to let go of the assumption that complex conditions can be atomized and controlled.

The network is the form governance takes in complexity.

This is the live edge.

What’s stewarded

What begins to change inside this emerging shape is the position of the funder: no longer above what is being resourced, but inside it — accountable to the same purpose, regulated by the same flow.

This is not a question of relinquishing fiduciary responsibility. It is a question of where the fiduciary imagination places the boundary of what is being stewarded. If the network is a locus of governance, the imagination has to widen to include the ecology, not only the institution.

Inside that widened imagination, trust becomes a medium of exchange that, unlike concentrated money, compounds with use rather than degrading. Resources cycle. Decisions emerge from the flow rather than concentrating above it. The funder is not less responsible, but the funder is differently located. The network can sense where the resources are needed most.

The cycles we learned as children — water, carbon, nitrogen — are how life sustains itself. Life circulates its essentials rather than concentrating them.

Whether what is taking form across these rooms shares a deeper pattern — one that names itself across the soil, the forest, the funding flow, and the network — is a question this series begins to explore next.

Governance is a word so laden with control and dominance that it seems to be a contradiction to the flourishing of all life that we seek. In rooms where practitioners are doing the relationally complex, regenerative, network-weaving work of transforming systems, it can arrive heavy and stale.

That wariness is understandable. Governance, in its dominant institutional forms, has been precisely the thing our work is trying to get out from under — the rules and norms behind the concentration of power and wealth that is crippling our capacity to respond to the issues of our time.

And yet.

The word we’re avoiding is the word that most accurately names what we’re doing. If you cede the language, you cede the frame.

Governance is the how of navigating together toward shared purpose. It encompasses a constellation of practices — leadership, strategy, narrative, structure, facilitation — all the ways groups of people make and remake their own direction.

When a group practices being present and embodied in meetings to ground their discussions, that’s governance. When a coalition maps the assets in a community and reaches out beyond the usual suspects for participation, that’s governance. When co-founders make dozens of small decisions about what gets funded and what is let go, that’s governance — even if their criteria are not yet written down and “approved.” When we facilitate mapping exercises to help people in the room recognize the complexity of issues and diverse points of view, we are governing toward insight and collective sense-making.

We’ve been doing it all along. We’ve just been calling it other things — collaboration, facilitation, co-creation, emergent strategy, “just enough structure” — because the word itself felt contaminated.

If practitioners in regenerative and systems change work stop using the word, then the only people left defining and practicing governance are the institutions already doing it badly. The word, and everything it represents — how resources flow, how decisions get made, who counts — gets left in the hands of the paradigm we are trying to move beyond.

In Circle Forward, we say: governance gives form to the culture’s power relationships and norms. Governance becomes the rules for who makes the rules and how — both explicitly and implicitly. The field’s quiet retreat from the word is also a retreat from the conversation about power, and this is precisely the conversation this work requires.

Because power gives form to governance too. When we recognize that shared power is a shared value, that trust is a currency in networks, and we design our first gatherings around building relationships — we’re locating governance in a new paradigm.

And here’s the invitation: reclaiming the word is itself a structural move, not a semantic preference. When we name what we’re doing as governance — the way we are navigating together — we can remake it. As we hold it accountable to the principles we already claim — equity, learning, power-with, living systems — it becomes a bridge to a new paradigm.

The question, then, is not whether to govern, but whether we can find patterns for governance that flows: that mimics nature, weaves feedback cycles for learning and iteration, evolves and adapts to what is emerging in real time, redistributes power rather than concentrating it, and is ultimately relational, like living systems themselves.

The alternative is to keep improvising around a word we’ve ceded to the institutions we’re trying to transform. That’s a gift to the old paradigm we don’t need to keep giving.

Governance That Flows is an inquiry into what governance could become when we let it transform too. Not the governance of boardrooms and bylaws. The governance of networks, of movements, of collaborative life. A living practice. A pattern, not a framework. Drawing on the traditions that have been teaching it all along.

This inquiry doesn’t ask you to love the word. It asks you to look at it. To notice where you’ve set it down, and what you’ve been using in its place. To consider whether the thing you’ve been calling something else might be precisely this

.