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Serving Life Series - Part 3.2
I broke down on a flight from Edmonton to Toronto.
That morning, I had walked into a boardroom to lay off a team — a decision I didn’t make. The team there was bright and enthusiastic. Some were even excited to meet me, their VP, for the first time. They didn’t know they were about to lose their jobs.
I hadn’t hired them or even met them. But I was sent to lay them off.
There was no time to stay or answer questions. I had another flight to catch and another city to visit to do the same thing again. Five cities were being impacted in one day. As I walked out of the room, their silence said everything. I felt like I had abandoned them — because I had.
On the flight home, I couldn’t stop crying.
Not just because it was hard.
But because it felt deeply wrong.
I had done something I didn’t believe in under pressure from people above me, who themselves were acting under pressure from the system I was.
That flight made one thing clear: I couldn’t stay in the corporate world.
We say governance is how we make decisions together.
But in most organizations, it’s not really together.
It’s about following orders from the top.
It’s not governance — it’s control.
That day, and on many others, I was its instrument of force.
Growing up, I believed in rules.
My parents, my teachers — they told me rules were how we kept people safe and treated others fairly. They believed it and so did I. And sometimes, rules really do help. They provide structure, predictability, and a shared sense of what’s right. They made the world feel solid — like there was a right answer to every question, a line that kept us from chaos.
But over time, I started to see something else.
Rules don’t always protect people.
Rules in school silenced curiosity; rules at work silenced truth. They’re not always built to serve life. Many are built to maintain control.
In school, you learn to follow.
At work, you learn to obey.
In politics, you learn to hand others your power.
And when you ask why it has to be this way, the answer comes softly — almost with resignation: ‘That’s just how the world works.’
But the world doesn’t actually work that way. Life doesn’t follow rules; it follows relationships.
Force isn’t always violent.
Most of the time, it’s structural.
It shows up when someone stays in a job they hate because they need health insurance.
Or when a nonprofit avoids asking real questions because their funding is on the line.
Or when an election feels like a choice, but it’s really just the least-bad option.
All of this is force — not physical, but real.
It happens when people feel like they have no choice. And it moves through layers of organizations and institutions, disguised as “the way things are.”
In that Edmonton boardroom, I was the one delivering the message. But the decision came from higher up — from a CEO and CFO who were under pressure to change strategy and hit targets. They didn’t want to make that call either.
But the stories made them believe they had no choice — just as I did.
That’s how force works. It puts people in positions where they act against their own instincts to keep their jobs, protect their reputation, or meet the expectations placed on them.
We justify our systems of force with a story we’ve all been taught:
That people can’t be trusted.
That without rules and leaders, everything would fall apart.
That governance is what keeps us from chaos.
It sounds reasonable. But it’s based on unjustified fear. It’s rooted in a view of humans as flawed, dangerous, irrational. And once we believe that, coercion becomes reasonable. Justified. Necessary. We accept systems where someone always loses — as long as it seems orderly.
Even democracy — which is supposed to represent the people — often doesn’t.
It has become a game of marketing, fear tactics, and manipulation.
What if we didn’t have to vote for someone else to act on our behalf?
What if participation happened where we actually live — not to choose a politician or a party, but to make decisions together, as people on the ground?
No campaigns. No slogans. Just presence. Just action.
No one trying to beat the other. Just people trying to solve real problems together.
We’ve come to accept the current system because we see the world through a certain lens. We’ve been taught that structure is reality — and that control is necessary.
Governance isn’t just what happens in governments or boardrooms. It’s how decisions are made — everywhere.
Even when we try to build alternatives, we often bring the same assumptions with us.
Mondragon, the world’s largest cooperative — the shining light on the cooperative mountain, is an example. It was designed to be democratic — member-owned and participatory. That’s the story.
But in practice, they vote for leadership. And when leadership makes decisions they don’t agree with, they strike. Even here, it’s still about winning and losing. About being in power or out of it.
That’s the trap.
We try to fix systems by changing who has the power — but we don’t question the use of force.
It’s still control. Just in different hands.
But governance doesn’t have to be about power at all.
Life doesn’t work that way.
A river doesn’t hold meetings to decide where to go — it responds to slope and soil and flow.
A flock doesn’t elect a leader — it moves together, attuned.
A forest doesn’t vote on how to manage resources — it co-regulates through countless exchanges.
Life operates through feedback. It adjusts. It responds. It finds balance in motion.
There’s no command center.
Just relationships, responding in real time.
That’s a different kind of governance.
Not formal. Not forced. Just functional.
We’ve all seen this kind of governance in our lives — we just don’t always call it that.
A family shifting routines to help a struggling child.
A team adjusting workloads when someone is overwhelmed.
A community organizing mutual aid during a crisis.
These aren’t policy decisions. They’re acts of care. They’re people noticing what’s needed and responding.
That’s life’s governance. And it works.
This doesn’t mean we throw out all our structures. But it does mean we stop using structure to control people.
Structure should support life — not replace it.
And I don’t believe anymore that people need to be governed through force. I’ve seen what happens when people are trusted instead.
When people are invited into decision-making, they participate.
When people are seen, they respond with care.
When people are supported, they show up.
Life already knows how to coordinate.
Ecosystems do it. Relationships do it. Communities can do it too.
This isn’t a dream for someday. It’s already happening — in small ways, all over the world.
People are trying new ways of working, living, and deciding together.
They’re building agreements that can evolve.
They’re creating open social protocols — not fixed policies, but shared practices people can use and improve.
These aren’t rules.
They’re tools.
They’re not about structures of control.
They’re about processes of collaboration.
They’re not based on static ideology.
They’re based on life’s reality — the kind we sense every day.
We’re not going to replace the entire system overnight.
But we don’t have to wait to begin. We already have what we need: The ability to notice. To respond. To relate. To see each other not as problems to control, but as people to support.
When that happens, governance stops being something done to us.
It becomes something we do — together.
And it starts to look a lot more like life.