Photo by Curioso Photography on Unsplash.

Have you ever left a meeting that ran exactly to agenda and still felt a bit emptier than when you went in? I have, more often than I’d like. Jan de Man Lapidoth, writing from Stockholm, thinks that feeling is worth listening to. He doubts the answer is yet another round of better leadership. He offers stewardship instead: working from inside the system you’re part of, and slowly withdrawing your support from the habits you go along with but no longer believe in. It’s a reflective piece. If you want something to try, next week’s experiment is where that comes in.

In this article:

1. A practice in withdrawal of consent

The way we organise ourselves is approaching its end date.

Not only in corporations or institutions, but in the more intimate spaces of everyday work and collaboration. Meetings where energy drains instead of gathers. Decisions that feel efficient yet hollow. A pervasive exhaustion we've normalised to the point where it barely registers as a signal anymore.

For a long time, our dominant response to this malaise has been to refine leadership. To develop better leaders, wiser leaders, more inclusive leaders. Softer skills. Sharper tools. New models layered onto hidden, and dare I say, outdated assumptions.

Paradoxically, in all this effort, the sense of an end date only strengthens.

Ecological breakdown accelerates. Economic insecurity deepens. Human separation — from each other, from land, from meaning — becomes more entrenched. The logics that dominate how we lead and organise are not merely struggling to address these crises. Increasingly, they appear to be participating in producing them.

This is uncomfortable to acknowledge, especially for those of us who have benefited from these systems. But it opens an important doorway.

What if the issue is not a lack of good leadership, but a deeper misunderstanding of our role inside living systems?

2. From leadership to stewardship

I've come to think of stewardship not as an alternative leadership style, but as a different orientation altogether.

Stewardship is not a soft or sentimental response to hard times. It is not about being nicer, more empathic, or more emotionally intelligent while continuing business as usual. On the contrary, it is a demanding and often unsettling practice. One that asks us to stay in relationship with consequences rather than abstracting ourselves above them.

This is, in my experience, less a matter of acquiring new capacities than of undergoing a reorientation — a shift in the stance from which we act. You cannot arrive at stewardship through training alone, because the move it asks for is not from less skilled to more skilled, but from a different understanding of what our role inside a living system actually is. That shift tends to be slow, nonlinear, and frequently uncomfortable. It asks something of who we are, not only what we do.

Where leadership, as we've come to know it, often emphasises direction, control, and performance, stewardship emphasises participation, accountability, and right relationship. It begins with a simple but far-reaching recognition: we are not separate from what we shape.

To steward is to act from within the web, not above it. To remain implicated. To ask, again and again:

What am I feeding with my presence, my skills, my silence, my compliance?

This shift in orientation has profound implications for hierarchy. When we no longer assume that someone must stand above a system to manage it, hierarchy begins to loosen. Not because we've designed it away, but because its underlying justification — the desire to control complexity — starts to dissolve.

In its place, other capacities become more relevant: listening, sensing, waiting, interrupting harm, redistributing power, staying with uncertainty.

Beyond hierarchy, in this sense, is not merely a new structure we implement. It is a byproduct of a deeper ethical shift.

3. Withdrawal of consent

One way to describe this shift is as a withdrawal of consent.

I don’t view it as a dramatic rebellion. And not an exit from all systems. But a gradual, conscious unhooking from the logics we no longer believe in — even when they reward us, even when they feel familiar, even when stepping away costs us something.

Many of us are still feeding systems we know are destructive, not because we agree with them, but because our identities, incomes, relationships, or sense of safety are entangled with them.

Contemporary leadership culture relies heavily on this assumed and implied consent.

Stewardship asks something different: not purity, but honesty.

An example from my board work in an organisation can illustrate. In a written briefing I expressed this:

“A promise to the board. I will not consciously be part of any complicity towards structures and practices that are harming the biosphere. This doesn't mean that we can shift everything from one day to another. It will take time. In my view we are uniquely positioned to be a role model and bring useful transitional practices and mindsets into the world. It may be tempting to say we already have this role, but my stance here is that we should check our bearings better.”

4. Intentionally moving beyond

When this reorientation begins to take hold, even partially, something subtly shifts.

Less a new structure, more a change in the quality of participation.

Moments where space opens because you didn't rush to fill it. Conversations that change tone because no one stepped into command. A redistribution of agency — uneven, imperfect, but more alive.

This is how life reorganises itself beyond control, hierarchy and machine thinking: quietly, relationally, without announcements.

What's asked for here is steadiness rather than certainty, integrity rather than purity, and ordinary courage rather than heroics.

It all starts with a willingness to stop feeding what no longer deserves our life force, and to stay present with what begins to take shape in the liminal spaces, in the pauses and in the relational fields.

Stewardship, after all, is not about having the right answers. Or answers at all. It is mainly about staying in right relation to life – when faced with paths destined to be uncertain and painful – and the old maps no longer guide us.

For more exploration of what Jan means by stewardship in liminal times, you can read it here.

Next week, we'll share a short experiment drawn from this piece — a few days of noticing where your participation quietly feeds a logic you no longer trust, and what happens when you pause. If you'd like to move from reading to testing, that's your invitation.

Jan de Man Lapidoth, Stockholm, October 2026