My life copilot, Laura, is a liver transplant nurse. She comes home from the hospital wondering how she could spend more time helping patients and less time working at a computer. She sees what people need and wants time to respond, teach, listen, and care. Documentation is part of her responsibility, but it competes for the attention she can give the people in front of her.
For Laura, this is part of the daily experience of nursing. For me, it brings home a question I have been working on for a decade: how can the ways we organize become more connected to life and how it actually works?
My experience in the corporate world helped me recognize the distance between what people are required to accomplish and what they can see needs doing. Targets, budgets, reporting, and chains of authority shape where attention goes. People spend enormous energy fitting their work to those structures, sometimes at the expense of the purpose that brought them to it.
Laura’s experience keeps the question close to home. Even in a hospital, where care is the purpose, the people providing it can struggle to give patients the attention they need.
How do we create organizations devoted to care that make caring so difficult?
Nurses, doctors, administrators, and support staff may all be deeply committed. They work within real constraints. Resources are limited, records matter, and coordination is necessary. But beneath those practical requirements sit assumptions about how we must organize: control makes people’s actions predictable enough to manage, and economic measures determine what is feasible and valuable.
Those assumptions shape schedules, staffing, software, and accountability. They influence what decision-makers can see and what a nurse must carry home.
I have come to see a pattern in this. As we organize at larger scales, we rely on rules, measures, and layers of authority to make work predictable. People make more decisions at a distance from the situations others are responding to.
When those arrangements fail people, we often reach for another layer of control. We add oversight, negotiate protections, require more reporting, or establish another procedure. These responses can protect people from real harm. They also leave everyone navigating an increasingly elaborate set of requirements while the original disconnection remains.
Laura still needs time with her patients. Her ability to recognize what someone needs draws on her training, experience, attention, and care. How much of that can influence the way her work is organized? How much has to become a number, a formal complaint, or a negotiated rule before it can matter?
People learn to attend to what is measured and required. What they experience beyond those requirements may become a passing comment in a meeting, an exception on a form, or a frustration that never reaches anyone able to address its source.
The patient continues to need care. The nurse feels the strain. The consequences remain, whether or not anyone records or responds to them.
This is the disconnection I have been trying to understand.
We are living beings, part of the living world. We need care, rest, nourishment, relationships, and the ability to participate meaningfully in what affects us. We depend on other living beings and on ecological conditions that sustain us. Everything we call an organization exists within those relationships.
Yet we often organize as though costs, outputs, roles, and rules can adequately represent those realities.
These abstractions have their uses. They also leave things out. When we give them authority over what people are experiencing, we can become better at meeting formal requirements while becoming less responsive to the life our work affects.
Reconnecting how we organize with life has become the central work of Radical World. The Common Ground Protocol, or CGP, has become the foundation of that work.
CGP begins with the possibility that people can connect what they are experiencing, understand more of the conditions they share, and respond together. Through those interactions, they can change how they organize.
Laura encounters aspects of care through nursing. A transplant patient experiences that care from a different position. A family member may notice something that becomes apparent only over time. Other staff understand constraints and relationships that neither Laura nor the patient can see.
No one holds the complete picture. Bringing these experiences into relationship can help people understand more than any single measure or perspective reveals.
CGP is being developed as a shared, distributed foundation for connecting observations, evidence, interpretations, needs, and consequences. Contributions would retain their origins and context. People could examine what supports a claim, where another experience qualifies or challenges it, and what remains uncertain. As circumstances change, people could revise their understanding without losing the history of how they arrived at it.
This is why common ground does not require consensus.
Laura and an administrator might understand a problem differently. A patient might introduce a need neither has recognized. They may find something they can change together while continuing to disagree about the larger situation.
Those differences can remain useful. They give people different questions to ask and different consequences to notice. Agreeing on an action need not erase them.
Imagine bringing Laura’s question into such a process: how could more of her time become available for patients?
Nurses could describe where documentation supports care and where it pulls them away. Patients could explain what they need more of. People responsible for records, resources, and coordination could explain the purposes and constraints behind existing requirements.
Together, they could try a change and assess what followed. Did time become available? Did patients experience better care? Was essential information lost? Did the burden move to someone else?
What they learned would inform their next response, making collective agency an ongoing practice.
This is what I mean by co-regulation: people sensing what is happening, responding together, and adjusting as they experience the consequences.
People already do this throughout their lives and work. They notice strain, offer help, clarify a misunderstanding, or adapt to an unexpected need. Much of what we accomplish together depends on this capacity, even when formal arrangements leave little room for it.
The question is how that capacity can become a basis for organizing at scale. How can what people perceive in one relationship or place inform responses across many others? How can they coordinate while remaining connected to the experiences and consequences that should guide them?
CGP is intended to help people make those connections.
That requires agency as well as information. Asking Laura to report more of what is wrong would mean little if it only added another task to her day. She and others need meaningful ways to change the arrangements producing those experiences.
They also need room to bring forward realities that do not fit the dominant account. A successful average can conceal a person whose needs remain unmet. An improvement in one department can create strain elsewhere. A financially effective decision can carry costs for families, communities, or ecosystems that never enter the calculation.
Grounding in life means allowing those consequences to change our understanding of success and how we act.
The distributed nature of CGP is critical here. People and communities need to retain their contributions while connecting them across different applications. No person or group should be able to establish a final, unquestionable account on everyone else’s behalf. People must be able to explore different understandings and examine the grounds for each, including any interpretation offered through AI.
We must apply the same scrutiny to CGP. It remains under development, with practical questions to work through: whose experience becomes visible, who can safely contribute, how people navigate complexity, and whether participation gives them meaningful influence.
CGP is also a foundation for other Radical World work, including Open Social Protocols, or OSP.
OSP explores how people can make ways of organizing explicit, personally adopt commitments with others, and revise them through experience. CGP would help them connect those arrangements to the needs and observations that informed them and to the consequences of putting them into practice.
Together, these projects support a continuing relationship between understanding and action. People sense what is happening, develop ways to respond, and let what follows change how they proceed.
In the next post, I’ll explore OSP and the work we presented last week at the Protocol Institute symposium.
For now, I come back to Laura’s question about spending more time with patients. It holds so much of what I have spent the past decade trying to understand.
She feels the distance between what she is required to do and what she knows care requires. I want her, her colleagues, and their patients to have meaningful ways to bring that experience into how they work together and shape what changes.
That is where CGP begins: with the possibility that what we sense as living beings can inform how we organize, act, and care for one another.