Stewardship
Concept and book.
Concept in the narrow sense: particular relation to property; in the broader sense: a new relationship between humanity and nature.
See also: Humans as Keystone Species
Contextual Quote
Humanity’s New Role as Stewards of Evolution
Francis Heylighen:
“In earlier phases of evolution, organisms adapted to environments they did not control. Humans changed that. Technology gave us unprecedented power to reshape ecosystems, societies, and even ourselves—but without a corresponding growth in coordination or foresight.
The Noosphere changes the situation. It enables:
• distributed intelligence rather than centralized control, • anticipation rather than reaction, • learning at the level of humanity as a whole.
This implies a shift in our evolutionary role. We are no longer merely competitors within evolution, nor external masters of nature. We are becoming participants in evolution’s self-regulation.
This does not mean designing a perfect world or enforcing a global plan. Self-organizing systems cannot be engineered top-down. What can be cultivated are the conditions that allow better futures to emerge: open communication, reliable knowledge, shared meaning, long-term prospection, and institutions that learn.
The deepest responsibility implied by the Third Story is therefore not control, but stewardship: guiding processes we are part of, without pretending to stand above them.”
(https://francisheylighen.substack.com/p/meaning-and-values-in-the-noosphere)
Concept
1. From the Wikipedia:
"Stewardship is an ethic that embodies responsible planning and management of resources. The concept of stewardship has been applied in diverse realms, including with respect to environment, economics, health, property, information, and religion, and is linked to the concept of sustainability. Historically, stewardship was the responsibility given to household servants to bring food and drinks to a castle dining hall. The term was then expanded to indicate a household employee's responsibility for managing household or domestic affairs. Stewardship later became the responsibility for taking care of passengers' domestic needs on a ship, train and airplane, or managing the service provided to diners in a restaurant. The term continues to be used in these specific ways, but it is also used in a more general way to refer to a responsibility to take care of something belonging to someone else. To be a steward, and or act in steward to something, is known as stewardship."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewardship)
2. Tim Rayner:
“Stewardship is similar to leadership. It assumes the initial functions of leadership: it reaches out to a community, extends invitations for collaboration, and most importantly nurtures a project once it gets going. Stewards know that to grow a collaboration, we need to create a space of sharing and engagement. Transparency, flexibility, and generousity are all important here. Stewards watch over the earth. They try to be the guardians of life as an evolving process.
Stewardship is a feature of sustainable and successful collaboration. The good steward is the person who assumes a role in the project and checks in at a regular basis to see that the project is proceeding correctly. In open projects and think tanks, stewards watch over the evolving discussion and steer it by providing perspectives on where the discussion is at, in the sense of what has been achieved, and what needs to be achieved, to complete the project.
Social cohesion and innovation need not be enemies of one another. Under the syncretistic gaze of a good steward, it is possible for a project to evolve in various directions without coming apart at the seams.”
(http://www.coalitionblog.org/2011/10/are-you-a-leader-or-a-steward/)
3. Richard Hames:
"Stewardship: A Different Gravity
I use the word stewardship reluctantly, aware that in some circles it has religious associations or corporate “ESG” connotations that risk blunting its edge. Yet it remains one of the few words that points towards a fundamentally different orientation to power.
If leadership is about directing others, stewardship is about protecting, nurturing and enhancing conditions. The object of attention shifts from followers to relationships; from control over people to care for patterns; from winning in a game to redesigning the game so that life can endure and flourish. The steward does not stand outside or above a system, pulling levers. They are immanent to it, co‑implicated in it. They recognise that every intervention has ripples, many of them invisible or delayed. Hence, instead of the leader’s fondness for spectacle and rapid results, the steward cultivates a more patient, less theatrical sensibility: convening, listening for weak signals, adjusting feedback loops, attending to the health of the whole rather than the triumph of a part.
Stewardship also reconfigures time. While leadership as practised in industrial economism is usually present‑tense and backward‑looking (protecting existing advantages, defending sunk costs), stewardship is inherently transgenerational. It asks: what previous events are unwittingly guiding today’s decisions and what might be the consequences of our responses and new initiatives for people we will never meet, in places we will never see? That is not a sentimental question; it is pragmatic once we accept that our species has acquired planetary‑scale power, whether we like it or not.
Is stewardship then just “ethical leadership” under another name? I am not persuaded, for at least one critical reason. Stewardship undermines the hero narrative. It disperses agency. A steward does not say: “I will lead you.” They say: “We are all entangled in a web of consequences. How do we take care of that web together?” If leadership thrives on visibility and acclaim, stewardship is most effective when it becomes ordinary, distributed, almost invisible – when many people, in many places, adopt the same underlying orientation without needing to proclaim it.
This is why we may need to reject leadership, not just improve or rebrand it. The very word drags us back into the orbit of the hero, the hierarchy, the glamorous centre. When we speak of stewardship, the glamour drains away and responsibility floods in."
(https://richarddavidhames.substack.com/p/empires-of-the-ego)
Discussion
Stewardship and Property
Redhat 707 comment:
"Stewardship by definition also implies a close relationship with what is being stewarded together with a sense of “care in context”. This opens the door for healthy consideration of the relationships of what is being stewarded to the larger context of the Commons and tends to produce a more altruistic based approach to management of the resources.
If we align stewardship with our passion, gifts, and Calling then we enfold a natural sovereignty within the expression of the stewardship that can also be seen in meritocracy based systems such as Open Source software development which characterizes ownership via stewardship quite well. Those that have created and/or invested most in the development and stewardship of a module are considered the “owners” of the modules yet this is not fixed in perpetuity but rather new stewards can come along and through demonstrated care and stewardship can become new owners (maintainers/co-maintainers). Furthermore, the ownership concept is granted by the community to the stewards based on merit rather than being granted through legal contract, purchase or other artificial means of structuring ownership. This results in a *process* of stewardship that must be maintained for ownership to be maintained resulting in sustainable-balancing feedback loops. A future where property “ownership” is implemented through ongoing meritorious stewardship is bright indeed!"
(http://alanrosenblith.blogspot.com/2010/09/21st-century-property-rights.html)
Rethinking Power: From Ownership to Custodianship
Richard Hames:
"At the heart of the shift from leadership to stewardship lies a re‑imagining of power. Under industrial economism, power is primarily conceived as ownership and control: control of energy, land, data, capital, labour, narratives. In that context, leadership becomes the craft of gaining, preserving and leveraging those assets.
Stewardship, by contrast, treats power as relational and provisional. Nobody truly “owns” a river, a data network, a child, or an idea. We are temporary custodians of flows that existed before us and will outlast us. The most we can do is to shape how those flows are channelled and to whom they are accessible. Increasingly this is a practical stance. In a hyper‑connected world such as ours, the fiction of isolated ownership is becoming harder to sustain. A company that treats a rainforest as its property to be logged, for instance, may trigger climatic shifts that undermine agriculture half a continent away. A government that hoards strategic resources may provoke conflict that spills across borders. Ownership in this sense is a comforting legal fantasy. Materially, we are all immersed in the same planetary metabolism.
If power is reframed as custodianship, several consequences follow. First, extractive thinking becomes less credible. You cannot sensibly talk about “maximising shareholder returns” if you accept that the capital you manage is inseparable from the living systems and social fabrics upon which those shareholders themselves depend.
Second, the idea of “externalities” begins to dissolve. Under current economic doctrine, harms that do not show up on a firm’s balance sheet are treated as side‑effects. Stewardship rejects that. Spreading costs onto people who did not approve – or creatures who cannot consent – becomes a breach of custodial duty. Any organisation that depends upon such breaches is, by definition, not stewarding.
Third, accountability extends beyond the human and beyond the present. If our actions degrade the capacity of ecosystems to regenerate, erode cultural diversity, ignore the richness of the more‑than‑human world, or diminish the wellbeing of those yet unborn, stewardship would regard that as a misuse of power – even if current laws permit it and markets reward it. This is where existing governance structures are struggling. They were not designed to hold such horizons.
It might sound radical to say that our political and economic systems are structurally incapable of stewardship. Yet if that is even partially true, the task ahead of us is not to humanise those systems but to replace them with new arrangements in which the guardianship of shared conditions – ecological, social, informational and existential – is no longer a decorative slogan but the organising principle of power itself. That demands a politics and a geopolitics in which the primary obligation of those who wield authority is not to maximise national advantage or shareholder gain, but to act as temporary trustees of a living world they did not create and have no right to destroy. Whether we call that stewardship, guardianship or civilisational trusteeship is almost secondary; what matters is the shift from ruling over people to taking responsibility for the consequences of decisions across borders, across generations and across species."
(https://richarddavidhames.substack.com/p/empires-of-the-ego)
Book
Book. Peter Block. Stewardship. 1993.
Dave Pollard:
"Stewardship attempts what might just be an impossible task: The converting of large, established companies into what I call Natural Enterprises. Chapter by chapter explains how to dismantle the obstacles to true entrepreneurship, slowly convincing the people in the enterprise that you are absolutely committed to radical change, that you mean it (lots of big companies talk a good empowerment story, but have absolutely no intention of acting on it). One of the hardest parts, he says, is convincing managers to give up managing (in favour of stewardship) and at the same time, ironically, convincing line employees to give up comfortable dependency, where they're not really responsible for anything. It's a difficult trade-off, and I am sure it would take enormous patience to pull this off, but Block is the master, and he's covered all the angles.
Stewardship attempts what might just be an impossible task: The converting of large, established companies into what I call Natural Enterprises. Chapter by chapter explains how to dismantle the obstacles to true entrepreneurship, slowly convincing the people in the enterprise that you are absolutely committed to radical change, that you mean it (lots of big companies talk a good empowerment story, but have absolutely no intention of acting on it). One of the hardest parts, he says, is convincing managers to give up managing (in favour of stewardship) and at the same time, ironically, convincing line employees to give up comfortable dependency, where they're not really responsible for anything. It's a difficult trade-off, and I am sure it would take enormous patience to pull this off, but Block is the master, and he's covered all the angles." (http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2006/07/03.html#a1577)
Principles
Dave Pollard:
Block's stewardship modelis one of equal partnership of all co-workers. Block outlines five principles for such partnership:
- The need for agreement on shared purpose among all partners. The organization reflects everyone's vision, not just "management's".
- The need for unanimity in major decisions. "Every partner has the right to say no".
- The acceptance of joint accountability and responsibility. No blame games.
- The need for absolute honesty. "Not telling the truth to each other is an act of betrayal".
- The prohibition of abdication. No sitting on the sidelines. Full engagement.
"He then moves on to operating principles for organizations that are governed by such partnerships. I've 'radicalized' these principles a bit, because I think Block tends to get a bit mired in traditional operating methods, and compromises the statement of these principles to the point they lose some of their power:
- Empower everyone: Day-to-day decision-making is entrusted to those closest to the customer, those on the front line. Learning from experimentation means learning by making mistakes.
- No managers, no hierarchy, no titles: Everyone manages themselves, and collectively manages the organization.
- Only long-term, qualitative measures: Collective, meaningful results, not behaviours and actions to get there.
- Local solutions, not standard solutions: Except where health and safety is at stake, standard answers are suboptimal. Diversity and innovation need to be encouraged, not crushed.
- Promise of commitment to service: Partners are in the business to serve others, not to maximize their self-interest. The freedom of equal partnership bring with it responsibility for service and full engagement.
- No secrecy: Complete information and the complete truth, all the time. That includes training everyone to understand the whole business ("business literacy") so they can make meaning of this information.
- Equal compensation: No individual ratings or rankings means that everyone shares equally in the success of the organization. Block is a bit equivocal about this, for good reason -- it's the hardest tenet of traditional hierarchical enterprise to give up, especially when competitors still operating under the traditional pay-for-rank model may seduce some people to bolt. I say let 'em go. I go even further, and say compensation should be based on what the partners need, not on their impossible-to-determine 'individual' performance. That needs to be spelled out in the partnership agreement. You have kids and a mortgage, you need more compensation than the 60-year-old with no debts; the traditional compensation model gets it exactly backwards."
(http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2006/07/03.html#a1577)