Questioning Ownership
What if organisations are no longer property?
Most of us have heard the quotes from Indigenous American Indians about the impossibility of owning the land.
“What is this you call property? It cannot be the earth, for the land is our mother, nourishing all her children, beasts, birds, fish and all men. The woods, the streams, everything on it belong to everybody and are for the use of all. How can one man say it belongs only to him?” -Massasoit
Somewhere inside us, if we really connect to land and air and animals; we know that there is some truth in this perspective.
Yet our current way of being is built almost completely on the ‘wealth’ of land/property ownership.
Here is another perspective.
What if we cannot own our organisations? Or even the more radical thought that challenges ownership in entirety?
What if organisations are no longer property, or instead shared property in service of their stakeholders?
What if an organisation is viewed as an energy field, emerging potential, a form of life that transcends its stakeholders, pursuing its own unique evolutionary purpose?
In that paradigm, we don’t ‘run’ the organisation, not even if we are a founder or legal owner. Instead, we are stewards of the organisation: we are the vehicle that listens to the organisation’s deep creative potential to help it do its creative work in the world.
Are you listening to your organisation? Really listening? (Are you listening to the calling of your own soul?)
The human construct of ownership is as any construct, able to be deconstructed.
Photo taken March 29th 2019
