Grow like Trees: An Organic Approach to Societal Regrowth
2026 is the year that system breakdown became impossible to deny. Democratic norms, societal norms, rule of law, the fabric of the social contract tearing as we watch. Or hide, unwilling or unable to face the unravelling.
The hopeful among us see opportunity through the dark. Tentatively or boldly we are discussing and unveiling new visions of a future, or reviving old ones. I am wary of grand plans. "Who guards the guards?" echos always.
I have always preferred an inductive approach to problems. If we can build a small local system that serves some purpose well, creates local opportunity and healthy dynamics, then if that system can multiply and defend itself, we can evolve organically. I would rather we grow like trees than be assembled like cars.
So what does this mean?
Small-d democracy is a start. It has always struck me as odd, that as while we learn about the importance of democratic institutions, our daily experience of school, work, and housing is essentially autocratic. We may have choices, but no participation in executive decision making, no voice in shaping what we want to see. An obvious problem is that market driven choice is skewed toward the rich, those the market is incentivized to serve. Further, the wealthy can spend to buy the rules, gaining ever more leverage over the systems themselves.
More pernicious, howevere, is the lack of any meaningful way to exercise the muscle of shared decision-making, of shaping the systems we live within. Our voices are rusty and unused, shrill with the expectation of being ignored.
Let us start with work, specifically corporations. The corporate form is essentially unchanged since the 1880s. While experiment and competition have driven advances in design of technology, the corporate structure itself with its top-down, hierarchical nature, is stagnant and ripe for disruption.
Cooperatives are one healthy alternative, and growing significantly; credit unions alone account for 140 million members. Starting a cooperative, however, requires significant commitment, and the founders lack the financial incentive that traditional startups provide. Do we have to limit choices to soulless corporations with control for sale, or one-member-one-vote cooperatives only?
No law insists that corporations must be top-down. Articles of Incorporation can define the classes of voting shares and who is qualified to hold them. Much as voters in a democracy must be qualified by living in a district, one can qualify voting shareholders by their active participation in the workforce, giving power to those who have earned it by building the company from within. Thus the board and CEO can be elected and accountable to the workers, a step further than most ESOPs have gone.
Startups especially are easy to experiment with, since a SAFE agreement allows investors to buy shares of future equity without having voting power in the present. And using a tokenized SAFE such as Fairmint actually can bypass the need for any liquidity event - the tokens over the SAFE are already liquid and tradable. Further, and perhaps most interesting for startups, the voting equity does not need to be granted in large fixed chunks, risking that one co-founder will flounder and create resentment. Instead, tokens can be granted granularly, even on a per-task basis, enabling fluid growth of the founding team and incentive for doing valuable work.
It is not the equity rules that are most interesting, however. The day-to-day exercise of shared decision making muscle, the building of expectation of ownership and co-governance, this is what starts to shape a new future for us all.
We are running such an experimental startup at LinkedTrust, using methods of earned governance that evolved organically because of our lived experience. So here are our results, what has worked so far in this living experiment:
1) Transparency not permission.
We have a globally dispersed and diverse team, hungry for work and needing to move quickly. Waiting around for discussion and consensus would be deadly. Thus, the key principle of transparency: move fast, but share your actions in channel in the team slack. Payments in particular, must all go through a shared task tracker, that all have access to and can examine what work was paid for. Opportunities and decisions should be in shared channels, that all can see. Decisions may be made quickly by leadership, but must be open.
2) Opportunity to object.
If decisions are open, it is possible to object to them. In our bylaws, we have a detailed procedure - 5% threshold to force a vote, supermajority to eject the elected leadership - but in practice in 6 years it has never been needed, at least not yet. Transparency by itself is a powerful force for trust, and enables sometimes difficult informal conversations about decisions, before formal mechanisms are needed.
3) Earned Governance
The task tracker, already the heart of many teams, also becomes the heart of earning ownership and governance. Peer-reviewed tasks enable team members to earn $COOK, our shared equity token - although, in practice, not all have wallets and we are far too busy to fuss with DAO type tools. The actual tokens are a legal backstop, enforceable by the board-approved bylaws if it is every necessary. The same result can be reached by non-web3 tools such as Slicing Pie, that track SAFE shares with legal agreements over them.
In practice, we track shares on a spreadsheet, dumped periodically from the task-tracker database, and refer to the spreadsheet for voting and sortition.
4) Ranked-choice, Work-Weighted Voting
Our current CEO was elected in a ranked choice, work-weighted vote, via Election Runner, an email voting tool that provided visualiztion of the ranked choice reallocation rounds. The team has also taken live work-weighted votes on major decisions, up or down on budget approval when we have significant funds to budget.
5) Sortition-based Rotating Steering Committee
Each month that we have profits to spend internally, a 3-person steering committee takes proposals, deliberates and decides among them, possibly asking for refinement or modification. One member of the committee rotates off each month, and the new member is chosen by a witnessed dice roll that lands in a row of the equity spreadsheet. Everyone has a chance to serve, but those with more sweat equity are chosen more frequently.
Entrepreneurial Culture
Perhaps the most interesting consequence of this system is how we deal with performance issues. Like any team, members sometimes mess up, or perform not up to the level needed. Yet as co-owners, they are not fired - not unless there is dishonesty involved.
Instead, poor or problematic performance may lead to removal from a project, someone else being chosen as lead, or some waiting period before receiving paid work. This is a natural consequence, one without shame - most of us have gone through it one time or another - and allows for personal and professional growth. Our most valued leads have gone thru the fire and come out the other side seasoned seniors.
We tell entrepreneurs to learn by failure, but in the broken corporate world many employees live in fear of it. In our startup we are all entrepreneurs.
We do not, however, currently have fixed salaries. This is because we are bootstrapped, without significant investor dollars. It is not ideal, but it is the situation, and for our global team the company has greater value than the gig work race-to-the-bottom platforms out there. We work together to develop products and relationships, branding and core technology in the areas of decentralized trust and AI alignment for teams, and we experiment rapidly in the changing world to find out what works. In most ways, we are like any scrappy startup.
These methods of earned governance have evolved organically. We have grown like a tree, responsive to inner need and demands of the environment. Now it is time to flower and seed, to cross-pollinate with others and wrap our systems into seeds.
Thus, this essay - an invitation to comment and share other systems with similar purpose. We are building a simplified toolkit that automates our homegrown, semi-manual processes, and looking for mentors and advisors for an Earned Governance Accelerator cohort to start in August 2026.
Because after the fires, is the best time to grow a new forest.